


The Capitoline Wolves

by Tiss



Series: this crown has teeth [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Canonical Minor Character Death, Danger of Mood Whiplash, Explicit Language, Family Drama, Full Shift Werewolves, Gen, Implied Murder of Children, Implied Sexual Content, Luna the enthusiastic dog owner, M/M, MTs are actual robots, Parenting is Hard to Get Right, Politics, Retrospectively Dubious Morality, Shameless Self-Indulgence, Unreliable Narrator, Worldbuilding, a really bloody civil war in a foreign country, gratuitous overuse of the f-bomb, it's really just werewolves flailing through life, language Gladio, lengthy descriptions of wolves hunting, non-graphic descriptions of injury, sometimes hilariously, sometimes specieism and war, this is much less dark than the tags make it seem, uncle!cor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-06-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:27:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 28,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23735362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tiss/pseuds/Tiss
Summary: All werewolves in Lucis hail back to the Amicitia family tree.Or, what happens to a kingdom when its only werewolf family has an oops and decides to roll with it. And then keeps rolling.(A few things happen, but ultimately, not too many.)
Relationships: Clarus Amicitia & Gladiolus Amicitia & Iris Amicitia, Gladiolus Amicitia & Noctis Lucis Caelum, Gladiolus Amicitia/Noctis Lucis Caelum
Series: this crown has teeth [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1738378
Comments: 97
Kudos: 37





	1. To call one's kin,

**Author's Note:**

> While I’m working on that depressing post-game fix-it thing that I’m gonna ask you to pretend I didn’t tell you about, I’m gonna blow off steam writing fluffy, action-y, cliché-ridden werewolf fic. I have no idea where this is going. It’s gonna be terrible. C’mon onboard.
> 
> Tags will be updated as we go along.

**Chapter 1. To call one’s kin,**

A long, long time ago, in the land that had taken the name of Lucis but a hundred years past, a dark-haired little boy was born. He was born to a fair-haired mother, whose parents ran her out of home when she wouldn’t tell them the name of the father.

In all fairness, she couldn’t rightly tell them what she didn’t know.

With the boy in her arms, she left her hometown and settled in a faraway village, taking odd jobs to scrape by. The folk were kind to her, and the boy grew, clothed and fed, knowing no true hardship.

Then, when the boy was hardly three summers old, he went to catch a butterfly and, between one step and the next, had turned into a boy-sized puppy.

The village folk were much less kind after that.

They moved to a new village, and a new rule was set in place for the boy: no one must ever know about what he could do. The seasons changed, and the secret was kept, and the boy grew tall and strong. Only deep in the night, when his mother was asleep and no one would see, did he sneak out of the house into the woods, change his shape, and play to his heart’s content.

Until, one day, a wandering trader came to the village.

Traders were always an event. Everyone and their mother came to see if something would catch their eye, and in the evening, when the trading was done, the youngsters would gather around his fire and listen to tales of life in faraway lands.

“Did any of you know,” the trader spoke, “that there are men in the capital who turn into wolves?”

A wave of disbelieving murmurs rose over the gathering, and the boy’s heart stuttered.

“They shift between man and wolf at will, and they serve the king himself as his mightiest warriors. They say the Six themselves gave them that gift,” the trader said, with an air of pomp and grandeur.

The boy knew, then, what he must do.

In a month’s time, he sank to one knee in front of the king and said, “I would serve His Majesty as a warrior, for I have the gift of the wolf,” and His Majesty the king’s jaw dropped.

The boy was then ushered out of the throne room and into a parlor, where a dark-haired, tall man attired as a warrior sat him down and spoke to him.

“Do you know who I am, young man?” the man asked.

“No, m’lord,” replied the boy.

“I am Aermius Amicitia, Shield of the King. I stand against those who would harm His Majesty. Was your claim of – the gift of the wolf, true?”

“Yes, m’lord.”

“Can you prove it?”

Boy, did he prove it.

When the man recovered from his surprise, he said, “Very well. You will join the training, like any other recruit, and if you fail that, you will return home with your tail between your legs. If you succeed…”

Here, the man looked the boy in the eyes and grinned.

“If you succeed, I’ll let you meet my son. I suspect he’ll have a lot to teach you about fighting with fang and claw.”

The Shield’s son was a boy of eleven summers old who turned back and forth in full view of everyone who cared to look and did, in fact, have a lot to teach.

“If anyone jumps on your back when you’re wolf,” he explained with the full wisdom of a child who’d been playing that game since he could walk, “you just gotta roll, and they’ll go _oof_ and fall off. And if they don’t, you can shake, and then there’s no way they won’t. And don’t be afraid to crush them, that’s the point.”

Within a few months, the two boys were wrestling like long-lost brothers, and people were saying how remarkable it was, that the wolves of the palace guard looked rather alike. All three of them.

And then the Shield approached the boy one day and asked him, “What do you know about your father?”

The boy didn’t learn anything new about his father that day. He was warned, however, that any children he had would have the gift of the wolf, and that they would have to serve in the king’s guard, and that he’d better think thrice about marrying, but when had that ever stopped anyone?

That day marked the end of the time-honored Amicitia tradition of hunting down and killing one’s bastard children.

All werewolves in Lucis hail back to the Amicitia family tree.

Back in the days of the Founder King, the Astrals bestowed upon one man and his line a blessing to better protect the king with. That man became the first Shield, and after him, his son became the second, and then his son after him, and so on and so forth, everyone knows how it goes. Yes, Gladiolus, exactly like that.

And because the blessing passed not just to the first son or the one who inherits, but to all of an Amicitia’s children, there was worry that the power of the wolf could fall into the wrong hands. That was why any illegitimate children were – disposed of. Yes, killed. Such were the times. In some cases, they were absorbed into the household staff, on the condition that they could never marry or have children of their own, but after the Freedom of Marriage act, the head of household couldn’t enforce that condition anymore, and the whole thing fell out of use.

Anyway, the tradition didn’t last that long, for various reasons. For some time after that, having the blessing meant serving under the current king, but then the number of wolves grew so many that it was unreasonable to conscript and train all of them, and there was the problem of wolves who didn’t _want_ to serve, too. That was when mandatory service was abrogated and a special team called _The Capitoline Wolves_ was formed. That’s the one. Well, it’s changed many names over the years. There was one king who called it _The_ _King’s_ _Hounds_. King Olvus, I think. The Hunter, yes. If he ever used our ancestors as hunting dogs, no one left any record of it.

 _You_ don’t go hunting because you’re too young, Iris. _I_ don’t go because I have better things to do. And stop gnawing on Gladio’s fingers, would you? Just because you sometimes look like an animal does not mean you’re free to behave like one. I don’t care that he doesn’t mind.

Anyway, back to the point. As I was saying, all werewolves in Lucis are, in fact, distant relatives. All ten-something thousand of them. So if you ever meet someone you’d like to marry and they turn out to be a wolf, you’d better check with the archives that you’re not too closely related. It’s likely to be a very distant relation, but still.

And Gladio, if I ever hear of a – mishap from you, you better be sure the poor girl knows what she’s got in her belly before she gives birth. Got it? Good.

I’ll tell you why later, Iris. When you’re Gladio’s age, and not a moment earlier.


	2. To bite to bone,

**Chapter 2. To bite to bone,**

When Noctis first meets Gladio, he doesn’t _really_ meet him. He just sees the Royal Guard training from the balcony and notices a dog with brownish fur flitting between them, nipping at heels and sneaking up on people from behind, the guards swatting at it with laughter.

He asks his dad.

“That would be Clarus’ son, Gladiolus,” the king replies, catches his son’s confused glance, and adds, “Your future Shield.”

Noctis thinks it is entirely unfair that he gets a dog as a Shield.

His father laughs.

“Do you know how Clarus is a wolf at some times, and human at others?”

Noctis really, really doesn’t.

“You’ve never seen a very large dog walk around in the Citadel? Well, that was him. He can take a human shape or a wolf one, whichever he wants. His son is the same.”

Noctis looks down at the guards again, at the dog barking and jumping around, and doesn’t really get it.

He gets it when he meets Gladiolus properly not a week later, when he sees a boy with hair the color of dried mud and he puts two and two together. When he calls the older boy ‘doggy’ – not with intent to insult, mind – Gladiolus makes a face so scary Noctis hides behind his father’s leg. It takes another week and several apologies from both sides to smooth things over.

Somehow, after all that, Gladio apparently decides that Noctis is too helpless to be left unprotected and sticks to his side like glue. It feels like any time Noctis doesn’t have lessons, and sometimes even when he does, Gladio is there, usually human, hanging out in his playroom or dragging him out to the gardens. Gladio has his own lessons – he gets to go to an actual _school_ , with lots of other kids and recess and, and stuff – but they have time put aside in the afternoons.

Gladio is eight, it turns out, three years older than Noctis, but Noctis is turning six really soon and Gladio has only been eight for five months, so that means it’s actually two and a half. It seems like a better deal than three.

Gladio is also almost a full year older than Iggy. Iggy isn’t happy about it, and tolerates Gladio more than he gets along with him. He also doesn’t appreciate Gladio dragging Noctis over to the Crownsfang training grounds, where huge wolves run around and do teamwork drills and present an unacceptable danger to a pair of very small human children, but there’s always at least one Fang who’ll happily take a breather and serve as a jungle gym for one small child and one energetic pup.

Iggy just stands aside and watches them with a disapproving face and doesn’t budge no matter how amazing the view is from the top of a wolf’s head.

Then the Marilith happens.

There are two Fangs in Noctis’ escort that night. It changes more than you might think.

Noctis comes out of the attack with a broken tibia, a dislocated shoulder and some very faint, oversized canine teeth marks on his upper arm.

King Regis almost disbands the entire Crownsfang.

While Noctis is stuck in a cast, Gladio brings him video games and books that he’d liked three years ago; Noctis only touches half the books, but plays all of the games, and Gladio picks a fight with him without meaning to, because who the hell picks video games over books?

They make up by the evening and play that one multiplayer game that Gladio is an absolute master of, and he teaches Noctis tricks until Clarus calls him home.

That’s about how their friendship goes, for the next however many years: they fight about stupid things like the stupid kids they are, and they make up because it’s no fun for either of them to stay mad at each other. Noctis doesn’t tell Gladio about how he still has nightmares, weeks, months, years after. Gladio doesn’t tell Noctis how every other training session with his father makes him feel like clawing his chest out because he’s _not good enough_. Noctis says nothing about how he misses his own father, how the meals they take together don’t feel like anything at all. Gladio says nothing about how he only feels safe and accepted in the Crownsfang training rooms, among the wolves who’d let him climb all over them when he was little.

So it goes.

Then Noctis goes to high school and makes a friend, and Gladio hates that stranger for taking what he thought was his place.

Gladio goes to train with the other wolves in the afternoons instead of hanging out with Noct, who comes home much later than usual half the time and misses their weapons training with Cor the other half. Cor, for that matter, picks up on the rift between them and says that being a teenager is a pain and he can only grit his teeth and wait it out. It’s not very helpful, but it’s weirdly supportive, and Gladio’s world seems marginally less shitty for it.

So he works on his rolls and dips and jumps, dodging, zigzagging, projectile evasion, all that stuff that Fangs need for field work. He won’t be going into the field, not without Noctis, not without his mission to protect his prince first, but he works on it anyway. It might come in handy as some point, and it’s good for keeping him agile, and it tires him out to the point where the only thing he cares about is falling into bed and letting himself sleep. If he can’t have answers to all of his worries, he might as well make his brain shut up.

Then Iris decides she’s old enough to go hunting and throws tantrums until their father capitulates, and it’s somehow Gladio’s responsibility to make sure she returns alive and mostly unharmed.

Mostly.

The only one Clarus ever has reasonable expectations for is Iris.

“Can Prince Noctis come, too?” she asks Gladio, so blatantly besotted he barely holds back from rolling his eyes, and it would be funny if it wasn’t so hopeless.

“I can ask him, but how’s he gonna keep up? He’s not a wolf, you know.”

“I know! I just thought… I dunno.”

Gladio gives her a skeptic look, and she glowers at him in response.

“Anyways! We can’t go just the two of us, can we?”

“Yeah, no. Four people at least. I’ll ask around in the Fang, see if someone fancies a weekend out in the wilds.”

And then it’s five people standing in front of the tipster in Hammerhead Friday evening – the Amicitia siblings plus Lagno, Hix, and Gavia. Lagno is still the same beanpole he always was, Gavia is working on a full sleeve of tats down her right arm, and Hix is an outcity expat who towers a good head over even Gladio. Together with a ten-year-old girl and a guy with a Galahdian-style mullet, they draw bewildered stares from half the diner.

The tipster, a jumpy, dark-skinned guy, keeps giving Iris dubious glances while he shows them the hunts.

“Ooh, Gladdy, look, this one’s in the same area! Should we take this one too?”

“I told you, just one. And not that one, that thing’s too dangerous for you.”

Iris rocks back on her heels, pouting, and the tipster finally cracks.

“Uh! Um…” He bites his lip, and when all five of them turn to look at him, he seems to pale. It’s hard to tell on him. “I don’t mean to be rude, but is it a good idea to take young miss over there on a hunt with y’all?”

Before anyone can say anything, Iris bounces in place and grins brightly at the guy, sharp canines on full display. When she lets her eyes flash with reflected light, the tipster gasps.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Tipster,” she says, “I can take care of myself.”

“And we’re here to take care of _her_ ,” Gladio adds, dragging her into a headlock with one hand and mussing up her hair with the other. Iris screeches like a banshee.

That night, they camp out on the haven nearby, heat up whatever they brought from home for dinner, and it’s the first true peace Gladio has known in a good while.

“You guys sure have it nice, with the Armory access,” he bemoans in the morning, when they’ve put on their radio collars and it’s time to go wolf. ‘Going wolf’ involves turning your back to everyone and trusting that they’re doing the same while you get naked, and it’s one awkwardness the Fangs don’t have to bear: they can just magic their clothes away to the king’s Armory in the split second when they’re turning.

“Yeah, right,” Hix scoffs. “Sanctioned use only. Use it when you’re not supposed to, you gotta file a report after, and it better be a good excuse, or Cap will skin you for a rug.”

Lagno laughs out loud, “Remember Glis, that one time?” and Gavia snorts.

“Yeah. No offense, kids, but your dad can be darn scary.”

“None taken,” Gladio says amicably, and Iris just blinks in confusion.

Hix, Lagno and Gavia, and also Tibris, who had a family thing and couldn’t come, all together make one team that tends to work together if at all possible. Most of Crownsfang forces are made up of these teams. Humans like to call them ‘packs’, which isn’t all that wrong, in practice, but it makes more than a few wolves more than a little pissed to hear. It’s a pretty recent innovation in the military, based on some modern studies of wild wolf behavior, and the most demeaning thing is that it works.

The thing is, there’s this thing wild wolves do. The scientists don’t know how it works. The Lucian wolves don’t really know either, even though the teams make constant use of it when wolf-shaped and even normal, civilian families find themselves using it on occasion, although those don’t really go wolf together much and no one has really been asking the right questions. Some liken it to telepathy, some attribute it to obscure body language that no one’s bothered to study. The long and short of it is, nobody knows how, but it works, and the Crownsfang takes full advantage of it.

The ‘it’ is advanced nonverbal communication.

Lagno, as the brains of the operation and the best nose among the five of them, takes point. Gavia follows, quick on her feet and ready to react. Behind her, Gladio, keeping track of what goes on to the left and right, and then Iris, and finally Hix’ towering mass, the heavy-hitter and rear meat-shield. Iris grumbles constantly about getting shuffled into the back of the procession, a choppy, whiny half-growl in the back of her throat, and Gladio swats her muzzle with his tail for being annoying. She looks comically tiny between him and Hix, barely seventy pounds next to Gladio’s almost two hundred. There’s even some of that puppy fluffiness about her still.

He’ll be damned if he lets anything happen to her on this hunt.

They trek out to the marked area at a healthy trot, slowing down sometimes to check the scents. There are all kinds of trails: day-old dualhorn tracks, a sabertusk pack, even a cactuar once. Iris bounds up to Lagno when he stops at that last one, but he cools her excitement with one short growl. Cactuars are nothing to sneeze at.

Their bounty is a trio of anaks that’s taken to pillaging a grain silo, two cows and a calf. The wolves come upon them almost by accident: they hear strange, muffled thuds, like something large beating against something mostly hollow, and then they round a large outcropping of red desert rock, and there the beasts are, scent and everything. They’re a good ways away, still, and though the picture is blurry in wolf vision, the scheme is obvious: one anak throws itself at the silo, making it shake, while the others pick up the grain that trickles from behind a loose seam in the silo plating.

The wolf mind is very similar to the human one, but some things are more important than others. If Gladio was walking upright right then, he would’ve been amazed by the anaks’ ingenuity. As it is, surprise takes a backseat to the hunt. Lagno pushes them all back behind the outcrop, out of sight of the anaks, and that inexplicable communication thing apparently takes place, because after just a few seconds of eye contact, Hix and Gavia go to round the rocks from the other side. Gladio tilts his head and makes a noise in question, because he’s not part of their team and doesn’t know how to tune into their wavelength, figuratively speaking, but Lagno gives him another long stare and a nose twitch, and the message comes through.

_‘Scatter them. With me. Keep the pup away.’_

Gladio chuffs and nods to show he got it, and Iris whines because she’s getting left out of the action again.

He gives Iris another _‘Watch, don’t engage,’_ for good measure and follows Lagno when he runs out into the open, making straight for the anaks. The beasts startle and raise a cry and lumber along with their weirdly graceful gait, away from the silo and towards where, Gladio somehow knows, the other two wolves are hiding out, downwind.

It all goes fairly quickly after that.

They split the cows apart and go for the lone, limping one first, nipping at its heels and wearing it down, and in what feels like minutes, it’s run out of energy and can only drag its feet. Iris drifts closer while they’re dodging the cow’s last attempts to fight back and stays blessedly quiet, even though Gladio knows she must be bursting with excitement.

Their prey goes down with a pained wail and a ground-shaking crash, and Hix grabs it by the throat and rips until it stops twitching, and it’s gross and bloody and glorious all at once. Gladio’s panting like he just ran ten miles. He might be a little drunk on adrenaline.

Then again, so seem the rest of them.

The mother and calf have fled out of sight, so Lagno tracks them down and they lay an ambush, with Hix lying in wait and the rest of them steering the anaks towards him. They decide to go for the mother first, because she would protect the calf and make a mess of their strategy, and because they need to take both of them down anyway. An unprotected calf is easy pickings. They might even let Iris chase it for a bit.

Then Iris decides to bite the bullet and give the calf a scare while the rest of them are still herding the mother, and it all goes to shit.

The anak turns on a dime the moment it hears its offspring cry out and vaults right over Gavia, who avoids a kick to the face by a hair. Gladio chases after it, and Gavia’s closer, but she’s small, and the mother doesn’t even slow down.

The calf cries again, Iris yelps, and Gladio sprints.

Then he’s between Iris and the mother.

Then a hoof lands on his head.

Then nothing.

He wakes up from time to time, gets snatches of conversation and glimpses of images he won’t remember later. Someone requesting medevac in a hoarse voice. Iris kneeling next to him, naked save for the radio collar and an oversized jacket, face blotchy and wet. A pain in his chest that bites deeper with every breath.

He drifts.

Later, in the hospital, when he’s lucid enough, they’ll tell him he had five broken ribs, a punctured lung and a pretty bad concussion. He’ll get a visit from his dad, who’ll sit there in tense, disappointment-soaked silence, give him the usual flat “Glad you’re alive, son,” and flee like someone’s holding a lighter to his tail. He’ll have paperwork dropped off by Cor, who’ll tell him to take it easy and promise to drag him out of the training halls by the scruff of his neck if he shows his face there anytime soon. He’ll get to see Jared, laden with home-cooked broth and enough concern and care for an entire family.

He’ll get Iris, doleful and trying so hard to make herself small, who bursts into sobs the minute she gets a good look at him.

“Oh, come on, moogle,” and bam, he’s got a lapful of crying little sister who’s now stuck to his blanket like a barnacle. She mumbles “I’m sorry,” over and over again, barely intelligible through her sobbing and sniffling, and Gladio rubs her back and lets her cry it out. Jared’s always been the only one who could calm her down properly. He, and mom.

“I just wanted to help,” she says, voice wobbly, another apology phrased as an excuse, and wipes the snot from her face with her hand. Then wipes that hand on his sheets.

He knows he should impart some sort of lesson, here, but even _his_ strict-big-brother-ness has its limits.

“I know,” he says, trying not to sound mad like he knows he tends to. “But you gotta trust us adults to do our jobs, okay? And don’t try to help if you’re not trained for it.”

Iris nods, face still miserable but considerably less wet.

“Uh, sorry,” comes Noct’s voice.

Gladio looks up, and Noctis is standing in the doorway, all shapeless hoodie and teenage awkwardness.

“Didn’t mean to interrupt,” he mumbles and goes to turn around, but Iris yelps before he can.

“Prince Noctis!” she squeaks, and begins to rub frantically at her face, smudging the rest of her tears around. Gladio wordlessly offers her a corner of his blanket; she doesn’t even notice.

“Hey, Iris,” says Noct, and looks to Gladio. “I can go wait outside.”

“You don’t need to!” Iris blurts. “I mean, Monica’s waiting for me anyways. Oh! Gladdy, when are you coming home?”

“Should be in a couple days,” he says. “I’ll let Jared know.”

“’kay! Get better, okay? Bye, Prince Noctis!”

And she’s gone.

“Bye,” Noctis calls after her, not really raising his voice, and then just stands there, looking lost.

Gladio can’t quite bite back the sigh, but he keeps it quiet.

“Close the door and sit down,” he tells Noct.

Noctis closes the door and sits down.

And then says nothing.

_Honestly,_ Gladio thinks, with no small amount of exasperation.

“Good job distracting Iris,” he says to break the silence. Noctis gives him an ‘Are you bullshitting me?’ look, and Gladio frowns. “Seriously. You’ve made her day. Now she won’t just start bawling when she’s home for dinner and I’m not.”

Noctis regales him with another dubious expression, which then melts into the sort of annoyed displeasure he usually saves for Ignis’ cleverer attempts to sneak vegetables into his food.

“You’re such a stupid fucknut jerk-off,” Noct says, flatly, and Gladio would be offended if he couldn’t see the burnt-out cinders of worry underneath.

“Ignis would cry if he heard you say that,” he snorts.

Noctis pouts with his eyebrows and looks away. It’s a skill passed down in the royal family, apparently.

“Don’t do stupid shit like that,” Noct mutters. “What if you get killed for real, then what’m I supposed to do.”

“They’d find you a new Shield, don’t worry,” he replies, and Noct’s glare is fit to incinerate him on the spot. Yeah, he should’ve expected that.

“I know, Noct,” Gladio says, soft, understanding, and he gets to watch something pained flicker across Noct’s face, something sad, and it’s as much honesty as he can ask for. “I know.”

Two short months later, Gladio bends the knee and swears fealty to Noctis Lucis Caelum, the one hundred and fourteenth of his line; swears to serve no other as long as his heart is still beats, to do everything in his power to protect his liege from harm, to lend a helping hand should he require it. They’re old, well-polished vows, vague and generic enough to make it unchanged through centuries of ceremonies. He’ll be signing an actual contract later.

Gladio holds the tips of his prince’s warm fingers in his hand and touches his lips to the signet ring and means every word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know FFXV has, like, meaningful(!) Latin-sounding names, but I can’t do that. I use name generators. Shame on me and my entire house.
> 
> Disclaimer: I have no idea if the wolf telepathy thing is legit; don’t quote me on it. All I have is the testimony of some Russian dude who apparently lived with a pack of wolves in a forest for several years or something. I dunno, I read about it a while ago. It sounded cool, though, and I say it’s legit enough for fan fiction, so whatever.
> 
> Also, credit where credit’s due: there was this one FFXV fic I read on AO3 where potions and stuff were more like instant energy drinks than actual healing magic, and I thought that made a lot of sense, so that’s how I’m treating the whole system in this verse, so no insta-heal for Gladio. This is how you make (contrived) drama, kids.
> 
> Credit No. 2: the idea of werewolves vanishing their clothes to the Armory/Armiger/whatever belongs to Archadian_Skies. I read their fic and just shamelessly ripped the idea off because it made sense and didn’t even ask. Shame on me, again.
> 
> Noct’s a teenager, he’s allowed to tsundere.
> 
> Ignis would totally cry, but not for the reason you’re probably thinking.


	3. To feast and sing,

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Werewolf Wednesday Surprise Update! There will still be an update Saturday, don’t you worry, I’m just a bit ahead of schedule with the chapters.
> 
> Also, this is definitely heading in a Gladnoct direction now. What can I say, I’m weak. Sorry, folks.
> 
> But! Good news: I’ve sorta got a plan, and it involves only a moderate amount of Gladnoct and a reasonable amount of plot. This is still about werewolves, Amicitia or otherwise. And plot. Like, a reasonable amount, but still. Politics. Plot. Stuff. You’ll see.

**Chapter 3. To feast and sing,**

Niflheim descends into a civil war.

Gladio hears about it from his news feed, like some civvy, and he can’t even badger his father about it because the man has been sleeping at the Citadel this past week. Come to think of it, this might have been the reason for it. Still, to be left out of the loop like this… It doesn’t sting, exactly, but it is demeaning, and it makes him look like a child still learning the ropes, and court politics is all about appearances. If he still feels like he’s floundering half the time, no one needs to know about it.

Still. He’s twenty-five.

Gladio’s belief that his father is going to keep stonewalling him until the day he dies solidifies with every passing year.

Cor’s been in town, too, if busy, but he’s one person Gladio can, in fact, badger about things. It’s how he’s scored himself a sparring-slash-training session for the morning.

“The situation in Niflheim had been volatile for a while,” Cor tells him, once they’re both sufficiently tired to take a break. “We knew taxes were getting high enough to drive a significant part of the population into poverty, and several sources reported systemic disregard of basic human rights by the officials and some newer legislations. Disregard of some legislations by officials, too. We don’t know if there was anything else that made the pot boil over.”

Gladio doesn’t know how many agents the Crown has in Niflheim: he’s only ever worked with Domestic Intel. He’d guess that kind of information would be need-to-know.

“Niflheim people have a long fuse, but they don’t do half-measures,” says Cor, even more serious than he usually is. “The resistance is out for blood. It seems like Tenebrae is backing them, but there’s no solid proof.”

“So the war?”

“We don’t know for sure, but it looks like the forces that have been moving in on Cleigne are withdrawing.”

Well. That’s _some_ good news.

“Does this mean you’ll be around to spar more?” Gladio asks, cheeky and unrepentant in a way his father must’ve thought he’d trained out of him, but Cor’s always been an unsuspecting enabler. It’s like playfighting, pretty much; tugging on Cor’s ears while he’s trying to sleep and getting walloped for it.

Cor always did take playfighting seriously.

So did Gladio.

“We’ll see,” Cor deadpans, but Gladio can just about hear the eyeroll.

The next few days sees the kind of activity in the Citadel Gladio’s only seen in disturbed anthills. Noctis, who had, apparently, also been kept in the dark, begins to spend more and more time in meetings and doesn’t even whine about it.

Not that, Gladio notes, he has been whining about them much the past couple years. Something had changed in him when Prompto got into the engineering program at ‘somniaU. Could be the peer example of responsibility, could be just good old growing up, hell if Gladio can tell. Fact of the matter is, Noctis has been stepping up as the crown prince, and Gladio’s glad to see him grow into it.

As Noct’s Shield, he gets to sit in on all of those meetings, or stand in, as it were, and it sheds some more light on what’s going on with Niflheim, but not much. Mostly, there’s just dithering about how Lucis should react: whether it’s worth it to get involved now or if they should play the waiting game and see which side comes out on top.

The king doesn’t seem much worse for wear in those meetings, but Noctis tells him in a low voice, “He’s been so tired lately,” and Gladio figures out why Noct’s been so interested in governmental affairs.

The meeting had ended on gathering more information before a move can be made. Intel is going to get very busy.

“I think I’m going to move back to the Citadel,” says Noct, and it’s not nearly as much of a surprise as would’ve been a year ago.

Noct’s been changing, slowly but steadily; even Gladio can tell. From his point of view three years ahead, he can see Noctis shedding his adolescent thorniness and embarrassment bit by bit, can see it in the way he rolls back his shoulders and takes up space and looks his father’s councilors in the eye. He did all of that before, sure, but now it’s all but effortless, a second skin he dons and drops much like Gladio switches between wolf and man.

It’s pretty amazing, Gladio thinks.

Noct’s face, too, is less rounded than it used to be. It seems like an obvious thing, that he would look older as he _gets_ older, but a couple years is not that long, and yet – and yet. He’s lost some of that lingering femininity, that delicacy that’s turned into refinement, into an elegant jawline and a gaze just sharp enough to forestall most condescension and blatant lies to his face.

Behind closed doors, he still lounges like a lazy cat. Looks at people much like one, too.

It probably means something that Gladio still finds him beautiful. Like, conventionally. He tries not to think about it too hard.

The expression Noctis puts on as he looks into his childhood bedroom makes that even easier.

“You gonna ask for a remodel?” Gladio asks, half-joking.

Noct unscrews his face and grins at him, cocky and confident, “You bet,” and that now-familiar warm and giddy feeling in Gladio’s chest grows.

It’s a problem.

Gladio’s most reliable, time-tested method of dealing with problems like these – feelings problems – is training. He’d trained after his father left him feeling like crap, and he’d trained every time Iris did something stupid and scared him half to death, and he’d trained when Noct was skipping out on him to hang out with Prompto. It had always helped well enough.

So to train he goes.

The Crownsfang training grounds, a broad stretch of walled-in land, are crowded and bustling with activity – something they shouldn’t be doing at this time of day. There’s probably at least several dozen shifted wolves in here, and then also several groups doing weapons drills in a near corner. A couple people are sitting on the grass close by, water bottles in hand’s reach; one of them turns to wave him over.

“Hey, Glads,” the man says.

“Pax,” Gladio nods. “What’s with the party? Didn’t get an invite.”

Pax barks a laugh.

“LT-Mighty came down on us yesterday, said we’re doing double training til’ further notice. Guess it was about that Niflheim thing.”

Gladio hums in acknowledgement.

“You got any of that sweet insider intel?”

“Not really. I know the Crown’s pretty much on standby for now, but that’s about it. Still haven’t decided on anything.”

“Well, I think it would be nice to squash those bastards while they’re busy. Flank’em, yanno? Between a rock and a hard place.”

Gladio hums again, thoughtfully, and offers no reply. Matter of fact is, whatever the resistance is aiming for might be worse than the Empire’s attempts at hassling its neighbors. Niflheim, at least, is an enemy they know. The rebel forces are a variable. He says none of this; he didn’t come here to argue strategy. He’d just wanted his brain to shut the fuck up.

Pax takes his silence for an answer, it seems, because he says, “Don’t think so, huh? Well, I bet you’re sick of talking ‘bout it, what with your da ’n all.”

“Came to take my mind off things,” he grumbles, half in honest irritation, half because he got reminded of just how close-mouthed his dad can be.

A guy splits from one of the groups doing drills and heads towards them, yelling, “Hey, Corp’ral, you’re up,” and Pax sighs.

“Arrite,” he calls back and rises with a grunt. He rolls his shoulders this way and that, and looks down at Gladio with a grin. “Wanna join the fun, Amicitia? Kick these louts around a bit?”

“Nah,” Gladio waves him off, “Don’t think I’d be any good as an instructor right now. Got my head full of crap.” And it’s not looking like it’s going to get emptied out.

“Suit yourself,” Pax shrugs, and jogs off.

Deprived of his usual coping mechanisms, Gladio has no option except to think about whatever it is he’s feeling. And he thinks. And thinks. And thinks some more.

And then he asks his mind, _‘Do I have feelings for Noct?’_

His mind says, _‘Yes, you idiot,’_ and, _‘You’re fucked.’_

Gladio stands behind Noct in the last meeting for the day, and tries to determine just how badly fucked he is.

He takes Noct back to the apartment, catches himself watching Noct as the prince kicks off his shoes and sprawls on the couch, following the lines of his waist with his eyes, and realizes:

He is completely fucked.

An Amicitia is not someone who’s allowed to crush on royalty.

Not that it’s a crush. And not that it really cares about allowances.

The Amicitia are wolves. The wolf gene is always passed to offspring. The royal house of Lucis _cannot_ be wolves, because wolves make up about 0.001% of the total population of Lucis. A werewolf monarch would be extremely unpopular and could lead either to a revolution or to a doomed dictatorship – doomed, because ten thousand can’t control ten million by brute force. Even if those ten thousand still make grown men shake in their pants sometimes.

Political implications aside, the Amicitia are absolutely not allowed to marry into the royal line.

But no one’s talking about marriage here, are they? They’re both guys, for goodness’ sake. No chance of accidental procreation.

So why, exactly, is Gladio fucked?

_‘You’re fucked,’_ his mind whispers, like that annoying kid in class who won’t stop pelleting you with paper balls, and Gladio asks it to kindly shut the fuck up, he’s trying to make some sense of this shitshow.

Okay. Let’s start with the basics. What are the actual chances Noct would even be interested?

_‘Kinda good,’_ Gladio’s mind offers optimistically.

_‘How?’_ Gladio grumps at it.

_‘He keeps smiling at you for no reason,’_ it hedges, and raises an imaginary suggestive eyebrow.

_‘That it?’_

_‘He’s in your space all the time.’_

_‘He’s always been in my space.’_

_‘Exactly.’_

_‘That’s ridiculous.’_

It’s not _that_ ridiculous, actually.

_‘Sure, fine, whatever. Am **I** interested?’_

_‘Thought we’ve already established that.’_

True.

Alright. Alright. So Gladio might have some chance if he goes for it. So. That’s fine, right?

So why the actual fuck is he fucked, again?

_‘Because your dad would disown you so hard, you’d forget what Lucis was,’_ his mind tells him, and he can’t even bring himself to argue.

That’s the crux of the problem, isn’t it?

Holy crap.

He’s twenty-fucking-five.

(He’s old enough not to be afraid of his dad’s disapproval.)

He’s also the Amicitia heir.

(He has a duty to his family.)

He also has a little sister who’s definitely into boys.

(He can opt out of that duty.)

He also wants to be a good brother.

(He isn’t sure he could live with himself if he did.)

Gladio stares at his bedroom ceiling, feels his eye twitch, and comes to no resolution at all.

Several weeks pass in this vein. Gladio stews in his misery, and Noct attends more meetings than could possibly be healthy. Gladio gets sympathetic back pain just looking at him in those chairs.

Noct also won’t tell him what he’s thinking for renovations in his Citadel rooms, the little shit. Gladio’s asked him how many times, now, three? Six times’ the charm, but threes usually work well enough, too, so what the hell?

The Niflheim pot keeps boiling on high. Some particularly nasty government official gets dragged through the street in a shame-mobile and then sent home with the Niflheim word for ‘cunt’ carved on his forehead; the photos are a hot souvenir in the Gralean underground. A somewhat-prominent resistance member, together with their entire family, gets caught and “quietly” convicted to death penalty; “quietly” just means there’s no official announcement, but everyone in Niflheim knows about it anyway. The Lucian bigwigs cringe and gag where appropriate and then get right back to discussing how to turn this mess in their favor. The king reminds them, repeatedly, that it’s supposed to be “crown’s favor” – ahem, “Lucis’ favor”; it never seems to stick.

In other words, politics.

Noctis used to absolutely loath the constant political power struggle. It was a big part of why he was so ornery about doing the part of the crown prince. He still loathes it, but now it seems to make him more angry than depressed: there’s sometimes a quiet viciousness about him in those meetings, the sort of aggressiveness that’s not on display but is very easy to cut yourself on. He gets like this when he knows some official or other is mistreating innocent people and getting away with it, and then that same official tries to look spotless in front of everyone else.

It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, Gladio wonders if the Lucis Caelum line is really as werewolf-free as advertised.

Gladio is immensely proud.

Another day, another meeting, another knot in Noct’s back. Gladio watches him stretch as they walk, arms all the way up, then a tilt to each side, and tries not to let the sounds he makes go to places they’ve got no business going in the middle of a Citadel hallway.

“Ignis says I’ve got nowhere to be for the next two hours,” Noct says, eyes locked on his phone, and Gladio casually steers him out of the way of an upcoming statue. “Think I’m gonna go lie down. My rooms are done, have I told you?”

“Oh? What did you go with?”

Noct looks at him sideways and grins, somehow mischievously, “Wanna come and see?”

Gladio goes.

And then promptly freezes in his tracks.

There’s a wolf on the headboard of the bed.

For all that it’s a pretty damn abstract representation of one, it’s easy for Gladio to tell. He’s not into art much, but he’d had a phase. It’s subtle enough it’ll pass for a pattern to anyone who’s not looking for it, but Gladio’s a wolf himself.

The fact that it’s a wolf, of all thing, is no coincidence. Gladio’s almost sure.

“Had it order-made. Really wanted this kind of design,” Noct says, somewhere on the edges of Gladio’s awareness. “What do you think?”

A bit dazed, he asks, “Am I seeing things or is that a wolf on the headboard?”

“It is. You like?”

Gladio has so many things vying for attention in his head right now, he honestly has no idea.

All he can say is, “Why?”

“I was thinking it might impress someone.”

Noct tilts his head to the side and grins a knowing, challenging grin, and if that’s not a come-hither look, Gladio will eat his boots.

“You sure you know what you’re playing with, Noct?” he asks.

“Pretty sure I’m not playing,” says Noctis, but his face says the exact opposite.

_Next turn’s yours, Amicitia,_ is what it says.

Gladio doesn’t know if he’s playing this game yet.

This would _not_ be a one-and-done. This wouldn’t even be a friends-with-benefits thing. You don’t put a wolf on your order-made headboard if you just want a quick tumble with your werewolf friend-slash-bodyguard. You don’t smile at him for no reason – well, Noct doesn’t. Noct doesn’t do or say shit without a purpose. It can be a dumb purpose, that’s for damn sure, like saying he likes his coffee black just to seem cool and grown-up when he can’t stand the stuff, but there’s always _a_ purpose.

Now that Noct’s past the teenage blustering stage, it’s more like he doesn’t say shit he doesn’t _mean_. Words, body language, whatever – he’s either honest or silent, and he’s gotten better at working around the honest thing without actually lying. And he doesn’t make a habit of working around it with Gladio – or at least, Gladio likes to think so.

Whatever it is Noct’s saying here, he means it.

Gladio had expected himself to be terrified, but he isn’t.

This has immense potential of blowing up in their faces, simply because it would be so damn _nice_. People in their stations don’t just get to have nice things, and he doesn’t mean golden faucets in bathrooms or tailored pajamas. They just don’t get much choice in the things that matter. Occupations. Spouses. Cities. Countries.

Gladio is suspicious as all hell of this, is what he’s trying to express. Not of Noct, but of everything else.

And what will become of them five, ten years down the line? When the question of children will be staring them square in the face? When they have wives to bear those children? Gladio might be able to pawn the heirs problem off on Iris, but Noct has no one like that, and it would be a shitty thing to do, besides. What then?

Has Noct thought about these things?

_You can’t predict your life five, ten, fifteen years ahead_ , Gladio suddenly thinks, and on the tail of that thought a memory falls in, of Cor recently back from deployment, sitting in the Amicitia living room with a curled-up, sleeping Iris next to him. _It’s all chaos, and we like to think we can bring some order in because it makes things more bearable, to think we know what to expect, but we’re just fooling ourselves. It’s a good lie to tell yourself. You’ll go crazy otherwise._

He can’t remember who it was that said all that, he or Cor.

He believes it anyway. Feels, in his heart, that it’s true.

Maybe he’s lying to himself.

But maybe he should be telling himself a different lie.

He steps closer to Noct, until there’s just a foot or two of space between them, and sees his eyes light up, excitement dancing just under his skin.

“What’re you gonna do with the bed if this doesn’t work out?” Gladio asks.

Noctis shrugs.

“Burn it. And half the Citadel with it.”

Gladio raises an eyebrow, and Noct’s face goes unimpressed.

“Auction it and donate to the Help for Stupid Assholes fund.”

“Am I the stupid asshole in that scenario?”

“Probably. I hereby swear to do my absolute best not to be a stupid asshole. So yeah. Probably you.” Noctis shrugs, then his gaze turns serious. “You in?”

What does Gladio stand to lose, really?

_‘Everything,’_ whispers his traitor mind.

_‘I don’t know that yet,’_ he thinks to himself.

“I’m in.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is it very obvious that I have no idea how people actually flirt in real life? Cos I don’t.
> 
> Gladio’s favorite Noct is confident!Noct.
> 
> Also, on a completely different topic, military slang is occasionally hilarious.
> 
> Next up: Clarus! And mama Amicitia. And some more Gladnoct.


	4. To make a home,

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alternative chapter title: Clarus, You Poor Bastard.
> 
> That tags section is getting thicc oh boy.
> 
> READER NOTICE: Rating’s – going – UP! (but no higher than M, I’m not that ballsy)

**Chapter 4. To make a home,**

When Clarus got married, it was to get his father off his back.

Soon after that, his father was killed in action, and Clarus was left with a manor, a young wife he barely knew, a majordomo who sometimes treated him like a younger, stupider brother, and his father’s job.

The job was the only thing he would’ve kept, if given the choice.

He left the manor to Jared, and he left Lilian to her own devices, and he took to his job with the kind of zeal that made his lieutenants roll their eyes and bring him lunches when he inevitably forgot to eat. He worked until he passed out or until Regis called down with a strongly-worded message that implied immediate bodily harm if Clarus didn’t go home right that second.

Then he came home one night, and his wife was waiting for him at the dinner table, over a plate of half-demolished cake.

She asked him, as soon as he stepped inside, “Do you only go wolf at the Citadel because you’re ashamed of it? Or are you some kind of purist?”

Clarus could only stare.

“I don’t shift unless I absolutely need to,” he said carefully.

“Then shift now,” she demanded.

Was she stupider than he’d thought? He’d just said, not unless he absolutely needed to.

Her gaze was steel. Fine Amicitia steel.

Clarus’ father might have been onto something when he was arranging this marriage.

He asked, “Why should I?”

“Our marriage was supposed to forge a connection between the humans and the werewolves of Insomnia. I don’t intend to see the opportunity go to waste.”

Well, when she put it like that.

“Good night,” he said and turned to go upstairs.

“Shift and come take a walk with me,” she called after him.

Seriously, that woman.

He asked, with no small amount of contained ire, “Can you imagine the headlines tomorrow? ‘Monstrous dog roams Insomnia streets at sundown, scares residents?’”

She retorted, “That’s exactly why we should go,” and she wasn’t making complete sense yet, but she was beginning to.

In a nutshell: Lilian saw the Insomnian werewolves as an ostracized minority, and she was going to change that.

Clarus didn’t argue that they were a minority, but from his point of view, he neither saw nor cared about the ‘ostracized’ thing. He could live as a human well enough. He felt no need to make waves.

Lilian, for her side, didn’t care that _he_ didn’t care, he was going to cooperate and that was final.

She took interviews. She came to political press conferences and called out measures that she’d determined unfair to werewolves. She appeared on a radio show. She started writing a social commentary book. She dragged Clarus with her everywhere whenever she could, and picked his brain for information when she couldn’t.

Her waves were more like ripples, but if anyone could stir up a storm with enough effort, it was she.

And she wasn’t even a wolf.

Two years after their wedding, she walked into his study and announced, “I’m pregnant,” like she was telling him she was going to have one of the guest bedrooms renovated.

Clarus looked up from his paperwork, took a moment, then nodded and went right back to it.

“I expect cake and pampering,” was what she left the study with.

She picked out Gladio’s name. Clarus picked his battles. That Amicitia steel in her spine was a match for his, but Clarus was well-trained enough in politics that could out-maneuver even the most stubborn councilors. He had enough tricks up his sleeve to take him through a controversial bill discussion that turned into a screaming match halfway through. None of them seemed to work on his wife.

Screw steel; steel can still bend.

She was cast iron.

Where Gladio was concerned, though, she was cotton.

“You spoil the kid,” he used to grumble.

She’d huff, “A little love never killed anyone,” and Clarus would leave well enough alone and only remind the boy to show some fortitude when she wasn’t looking.

Lilian was also the one who put a veto on homeschooling.

“He needs to be properly socialized,” she’d argue, strict and no-nonsense. “Unlike some other wolves I know.”

She never missed an opportunity to take a dig at his and Cor’s lack of people skills. Half the time, Clarus didn’t care; the other half, he was ready to strangle her for it.

Cor just didn’t care full-time and kept on coming over to play with Gladio, when the man was actually around.

At some point, Clarus began to look forward to going home.

(Months pass, routines settle, and Gladio finds himself spending more and more nights in Noct’s bed. Noct says he’s welcome to stay over whenever he wants: something about a childhood sense of loneliness and feeling too small for his room.

At least Gladio had had the forethought to request a room of his own beforehand.

Not that it amounted to anything, in the end.

“Gladio, my man,” Arnis, one of his father’s lieutenants, calls out to him one evening when Gladio’s just about to leave the Crownsfang HQ, and he pauses at the door. “Me and the guys are going out, you wanna join? Nothing special, just drinks and shooting the shit.”

“Nah, sorry. Busy,” he grins amicably. “His Royal Pain in the Ass will get snippy if I back out on him.” It’s not even a lie, he really does have a standing agreement with Noct. Arnis doesn’t need to know what it’s about, though.

Arnis, however, gets a very sly, knowing glint in his eyes.

“Yeah, I know how that goes,” he says with a suggestive grin, and claps Gladio on the shoulder as he leaves. “Next time, man. You have a good night.”

Gladio is not an idiot.

And the pattern just keeps repeating. Other Crownsfang members, Royal Guards he only sort of knows, random Citadel staff who smile sweetly when they see him and Noct together.

A very uncomfortable suspicion slowly forms, and Gladio can only hope the gossip hasn’t reached his father. Or Noct’s.

It was stupid of them, probably, to think that no one would notice if Gladio repeatedly spent the night. Part stupidity, part wishful thinking. If the wrong people catch wind of it, it could very well cause a shitstorm of truly epic proportions.

And yet weeks pass, and then months, and no one has confronted them. The councilors take subtle jabs at Noct’s education and his habits and his half-asleep gaze, but not a single one hints at what goes on in his bedroom. The Fangs give Gladio knowing looks and make ribald jokes at his expense, but no one so much as implies they have even a hint to the identity of his lover.

They keep the tightest lid on PDA, still.

Gladio relaxes in increments, as time goes by, and dares believe that this particular storm will go wide.

He forgets about the future for the moment, and it’s nice. Really, really nice.)

When Lilian told him she was pregnant again, Clarus actually smiled.

“You’re making progress,” she said, with a grin of her own. “Last time, you hardly blinked.”

She died when Iris was three, when she’d ignored her body long enough for the cancer to take over. Regis had offered to contact the Oracle in Tenebrae, but Niflheim had been particularly strong in the region then; it had been too much of a risk.

Later, Clarus would think that he’d been stupid. That he should’ve tried, at least. That, risk or no risk, without the Oracle’s help his wife was as good as dead, but if they’d gone, she could’ve had a chance, at least.

Iris asked for her mom every day for several months. Every day, for a week and a half, Clarus explained to her that mom was gone and not coming back. Then he couldn’t anymore. Jared and Gladio took over instead.

She cried every time, even months on.

Clarus had no idea how to do this on his own, and failure was not an option.

Inaction, though.

There was only so much worrying he could do about ruining his children’s lives, so he did the one thing he knew best – buried himself in his duties. His lieutenants gave him looks and didn’t say anything, and Jared gave him looks, too, but of a different kind, and he said things sometimes, things like, “Young lady was asking after you today,” or, “It seems there are new chocobo chicks at the zoo, I’m sure Lady Iris would be delighted to see them.”

Gladio seemed to have stopped looking at him at all.

Then the Marilith happened, and Gladio spent his after-school hours cloistered away with the prince, and Clarus let himself forget about that particular headache for a while. Let the tidal sway of everyday problems sweep him away.

It was so easy.

And then Gladio’s school called him because the kid had bitten someone with his wolf teeth, and Clarus had to wake up.

(The sex is even better than Gladio could’ve hoped for.

Gladio classifies himself as “technically bi” – mostly straight but not above appreciating fine male form, and occasionally even doing something about it. Which is to say, he doesn’t mind when guys hit on him, but he doesn’t generally bother making the first move.

He really doesn’t need to, with Noct. Noct makes all the first moves.

Noctis is surprisingly bold, and completely earnest about what he wants – usually, it’s to lie back and have Gladio do all the work, and then take over if he thinks Gladio’s taking his sweet time.

“Get back here.”

“Let me get the sixdamn lube. Why’d you stash it all the way over here?”

“Are you into necrophilia? Because at the rate you’re going, I’m going to be a cold corpse by the time you get back.”

Gladio climbs back on the bed, lube in grasp, and Noct lifts the small of his back from the mattress in what is obviously a carefully calculated move.

“Drama queen.”

“Drama prince,” Noctis retorts flatly. “I want you.”

They don’t have all that much time for that kind of fun – or any kind of fun, really. Once Noct let Ignis know that he was open to some more princely duties, it was like Ignis had just been waiting for a sign, because Noct’s schedule immediately filled up to the absolute brim. There are a lot of public appearances there, the stuff that His Majesty usually does but can be safely left to his son, and public appearances mean Gladio has to be there, all parts imposing and zero parts funny business, and that he also has to oversee the Crown-side security for every event.

Thank all the gods there are already procedures in place.

Clarus still looks over his shoulder a fair bit, but Gladio gets it: better your son’s ego than your crown prince’s life. His ego, therefore, comes out mostly unscathed.)

The teachers didn’t seem to know much about what exactly had led up to it, and didn’t seem to want to know, either. Clarus noticed the wide berth they gave him, and he saw the wary way they looked at Gladio, and only then did it click how precarious this all was.

The Crownsfang live in a bubble of their own, a bunch of really, really distant relatives who will stand up for their own in a heartbeat. They go where the king points them, and they rip it to shreds, and they return to their den and bare their teeth at anyone who dares intrude. Stay away, strangers. We want nothing to do with you.

Lilian had hardly begun to understand that human prejudice was only one half of the problem.

“If something like this happens again, I’ll have no choice but to pull you out of school,” he told Gladio on their way home, and the kid just nodded and didn’t say a word.

He never told Clarus what made him bite that other kid.

Clarus never asked.

When Gladio got that scar on his face because he wouldn’t raise a hand against a Crown citizen, Clarus wished Lilian was there, to fight the battles he couldn’t. He got drunk that night.

It was the proverbial last straw, after what happened to Gladio on that Six-damned hunt.

Something absolutely had to change. He just didn’t know what.

(It’s exactly because Noct is so busy all the time, and, consequently, tired the rest of it, that when they get a free hour before lunch, they plan to make the most of it. If someone comes looking for them, they can buzz right off, because it’s been a full _week_ and the door is locked and the phones are on emergency only and they’re not leaving until they get at least two orgasms each. Gladio’s backed up, godsdamnit, and self-care isn’t cutting it.

Noct’s all for it, if the way he clings and grabs is any indication.

They get as far as horizontal and well-mussed before there’s a knock on the door.

Noct tucks his face into Gladio’s throat and sighs the sigh of the young and unjustly deprived. Quietly. Because he probably believes that if he just stays quiet, they won’t realize he’s here, the hopeful fucker.

“Noctis?” comes a call, and oh fuck, it’s Regis’ voice.

They share a miserable look, and then Noct calls back, “Just a minute,” and hauls himself off of the bed to fix his clothes.

They have their conversation out in the hallway. Gladio catches little of it before Noct comes back, defeated in a what-can-you-do way, and sinks down next to where Gladio is sitting. After a second, he flops back, arms flung wide: the picture of exhaustion.

“He wants to have lunch,” Noct delivers, voice half-dead. “Now.”

“Just lunch?”

Noctis sighs. “And talk. Wouldn’t say what about.”

Gladio frowns.

“You think we’re in shit?”

“Dunno,” says Noct and grabs the edge of Gladio’s shirt without looking, just to hold on. “But I’m not getting a good feeling about this.”)

Clarus got called the minute Central reported an emergency on his kids’ outing.

A car had been dispatched from a gateside base already. He couldn’t go on it even if it had been the sensible thing to do.

He wore a groove into his office floor instead, back and forth and back again until his secretary started to give him pitying looks, so he relocated to Central Radio Control, where they recognized him by his facial expression alone, it seemed, and rushed to assure him the EMTs picking up his son were all trained professionals.

He forced himself to keep it together after that.

Gladio was going straight to hospital, they told him. Maybe it was for the best. No, it definitely was for the best. Proper medical care ranked above a man’s irrational wish to see his son.

He met the van when it rolled in, spared a glance for the Fangs who climbed out and lined up at attention, and looked inside, at his daughter curled over her knees in a corner, dressed in some military-issue T-shirt and boxers that were way too big on her, an officer’s jacket draped over her shoulders, at the dirt on her face and the wetness of it and the redness and puffiness and deadness of her eyes. His ten-year-old daughter. His own daughter.

His son was probably in surgery by then.

“Iris,” he called, quiet and flat, like he usually did – “ _…properly socialized, unlike some other wolves I know,”_ – and she looked up at him, took a breath, and started sniffling. Quietly.

He stepped inside the van, pulled a cloak out of the Armory and wrapped Iris in it.

She grabbed his arm. He pulled her up. Led her out. She let go.

His daughter clung to him without actually clinging, just – huddled close and held the cloak tight between her hands. He tried to remember if he’d ever snapped at her for grabbing his clothes. Couldn’t.

He also had the mind-numbing realization that he didn’t know how to be soft with his kids. Really, properly soft. He’d thought he’d been plenty soft on Iris, and yet.

After he was done visiting Gladio in hospital, he locked himself in his office, set a timer for one hour, and allowed himself a quiet and contained break down.

He’d never felt like so much of a failure as a parent before.

Later that night, he sat in Regis’ study and tried to ask him what he was supposed to do.

“Go home to your family, Clar,” Regis told him. “Be there for them. Go home.”

So he did.

(Noctis’ father meets him in the hallway. They walk. There’s no one around, not even the guards.

Then Regis asks, “Son, how – involved, are you, with Gladiolus?” and Noctis’ chest seizes.

Oh, _Gods,_ no.

Not so soon.

“I know you’re involved to _some_ degree, that is not the issue here,” his father continues. Noctis just tries to process that sentence. “I’m only asking because… It might make the matter I wanted to discuss more complicated for you.”

Noctis’ heart pounds. Possible meanings buzz. He can’t make sense of this, but he’s _worried_.

He says, eventually, “I think you better tell me what you’re planning first.”

Regis tells him.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp, Clarus confronted his shortcomings and lost. This conflict’s nowhere near done, though.
> 
> Also, cliffhanger?
> 
> Next up: Iris! And very very little main plot, but plenty of werewolf sub-plot. Or is it alternative-plot now? This is getting messy. Might be another Wednesday update, cos Ch5 is pretty much done and I should be able to get Ch6 out by next Sat. Hooray for my meds - ahem, productivity!


	5. To wear a path,

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know, it only just occurred to me that putting “Implied Murder of Children” and “Shameless Self-Indulgence” next to each other in the tags might be giving the wrong idea…

**Chapter 5. To wear a path,**

There was a point in Iris’ life where she thought being a werewolf was the Best Thing Ever.

Yes, the city stinks, even if it’s all you’ve ever known, but the Amicitia manor is in one of the cleaner districts. Yes, the clothes get stuck on you if you don’t take them off beforehand, but what five-year-old cares about that?

Jared tells her she had a phase, as a toddler, where she loathed clothes and would take them off at every opportunity. Must’ve made shifting even easier.

Jared also tells her that her dad had intended to have her homeschooled, but she’d thrown such a fit about going to school like Gladio that he’d had no option but to give in.

It was good, for a while.

The teachers didn’t much appreciate having an oversized puppy zooming around at gym and recess, she quickly learned, and while it wasn’t fair, from her point of view, she could go along with it. It wouldn’t be fair to everyone else, after all, if she outraced them all just because she could have four legs and they were stuck with two.

The other kids didn’t seem to think it was unfair. If anything, they thought it was cool, and funny, and had a huge potential for make-believe games. Iris had played both the royal knight and the loyal hound more times than she could count, and sometimes she’d get pets as part of the game, which was always nice. Her dad didn’t have time for cuddling, and Gladdy was more likely to swing her in a circle than to sit still and let her burrow close.

When she was around seven, Gladdy came home from school sullen and moody, and he just stretched out on a couch in the living room and sulked.

“What ‘appened?” she asked.

Gladdy looked over at her, still sullen, and huffed, “Nothing.”

“You’re _sad_ ,” she insisted, and came over to lay her head on his belly.

“Just some idiots at school,” Gladdy mumbled, “Being mean and stuff. It’s nothing.”

“D’you want me to bite them?” Iris offered immediately. No one was getting away with being mean to Gladdy. “I’ll bite ‘em till ‘ey squeal!”

Contrary to all expectation, Gladdy frowned at her and said very seriously, “No biting people, Iris. You can’t bite anyone at school, got it? At all. And no getting into fights.”

He was so intense as he said it that she could only nod and mumble, “Okay.”

Then she went and got Gladdy hurt, and wolfing out kind of stopped being fun after that.

By the time she got to middle school, it was no fun at all. Her new classmates would get all weird whenever they got reminded she was a wolf, asking all sorts of strange questions:

“Is it true you go on a murderous rampage on the full moon?”

“Does your house just always smell of dog?”

“Do you people only do it doggy style?”

She found out what ‘doggy style’ meant, eventually. Shifting got even more embarrassing after that.

The pattern got clearer as she grew older. It was just less trouble to keep quiet about what she was. Most people didn’t really know what Lucian wolves even were, although just about everyone knew the Shield was one and the Crownsfang was a bunch of them. It was just something nobody talked about. Outcity accent got you condescending looks from your barista. Badmouthing the Crown was liable to get your blog suspended. The Crownsfang wolves risked their lives every deployment, but it was okay because they weren’t human anyway.

“Hey, Amicitia!”

“What?”

“What’s your dad even do for the king? Play fetch?”

_‘Ignore him, just ignore him.’_

“I’m talking to you, Amicitia!”

She ignored him.

He shoved her.

She shoved back, and he went sprawling. There was blood.

Then they were the both of them in the principal’s waiting room while the secretary called up their parents. The boy had clipped his head on a desk going down, and there was a gash on his arm. Iris was fine.

Dad wasn’t available. Gladio came instead.

“She could’ve killed my son!”

Gladio looked coolly at the boy’s mother, then at the large band-aid on the kid’s arm, and raised an eyebrow. “How, exactly?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” the mother kept ranting, “He could’ve broken his skull instead of a mild concussion if that girl had used her full force.”

“And why do you think my twig of a little sister could shove anyone hard enough to do that?”

The woman sputtered.

“Well – I – she’s a werewolf!”

“So?”

Iris risked a glance up from the floor. Gladio looked like he was starting to get angry. The boy she’d shoved wouldn’t meet anyone’s eyes.

“ _So_ , you need to teach your children to control their inhuman strength before you release them into the society!”

“We don’t _have_ inhuman strength when we’re human, lady. Besides, why was your son picking a fight in the first place?”

“ _My son_ would never pick a fight with a girl!”

In the end, Iris got suspended for three days.

They let the boy off with a warning.

Gladio walked in silence next to her, hands tucked inside his jacket pockets. Classes were still going on, and it was eerily quiet in the hallways.

Iris mumbled to herself, hurt, “Why am _I_ the bad guy here?” and Gladio only sighed, heavy and long.

They’d said it was because the boy got hurt worse. That was what they’d said.

It hadn’t sounded particularly honest, or fair.

“Wanna go get ice cream on the way home?” Gladio asked. “A huge tub. Split it between us, not a word to dad.”

 _Does he really think ice cream will solve anything?_ she thought.

“Chocolate?” she asked.

“Chocolate,” Gladio nodded. “With chunks, if they have it. Also, I took my bike here.”

She turned to stare at him, shocked. “Dad will _kill_ you,” she hissed.

“He won’t if no one tells him,” Gladio countered, hint of a conspiratorial smile breaking through. “Besides, I’ve got the spare helmet. I’ll drive careful, I swear.”

“Don’t you dare,” said Iris.

And for a while, it didn’t matter.

For a while.

When Iris turns eighteen, she tries to join the Crownsfang.

All it gets her is a ground-shaking fight with her father _and_ Gladio, and weeks of tension afterwards. Iris thinks she should be allowed to pick her own future and will be able prove herself if given the chance; Clarus wants her to do something, anything that’s not all about wolves and won’t hear a word otherwise. Gladio just says she can do much better than the military.

She doesn’t want _better_ , she just wants to not feel like an outcast.

High school was a good deal easier than middle school, paradoxically enough. She just didn’t give people her last name unless they really asked, and when they found out anyway and connected the dots, some were out on the fringes enough that they didn’t care. There was another wolf at her school, too, which was nice, even if they were hardly best friends. Too little in common. It was alright, though. She had a decent gang of weirdos going through phases and just people whose tastes didn’t fit in with the rest. Their whole shtick was not shaming each other for whatever it was the society was shaming them for.

She probably hasn’t made any lifelong friends, but it was fun while it lasted.

But now it’s summer, and dad and Gladdy are both stuck at work all day while Iris has _absolutely nothing to do_. She’s too late to apply for college this year, and there’s only so much hanging out with friends she can do, and she’s _bored_.

And bored Iris gets _ideas._

Going through family archives, as far as bored-Iris ideas go, is not that bad.

Her own childhood photos are mostly embarrassing, but the stuff from before that, stuff that has baby Gladio and dad with a head full of hair in it, is pretty interesting. There’s a photo of an eight-year-old Gladio scrabbling up a very large wolf’s side while a smaller, probably five-year-old Noctis is looking up at him with an uncertain look on his face. There’s one with an even younger Gladio creeping up on a different wolf, one which seems to be napping in the Amicitia backyard, and right next to that photo, there’s another one with a huge, T-shirt-clad puppy dangling meekly from the wolf’s mouth by the scruff. The notes on the back identify the puppy as Gladio, and the wolf as Cor.

There’s not a single photo of her mom.

“Lord Clarus has all documents concerning your mother stored separately,” Jared explains while they head back to the big study. “I am not sure why he did it, myself, but I suspect her passing might have hurt him more than he was ready to admit. Your father has always ignored his own hurts unless they incapacitated him in some way.”

He sighs, then adds quietly, somberly, “Lady Lilian was exactly like him in that respect.”

In the study, Jared opens one of the solid wood cabinets above the shelves and brings down a huge pile of albums and files and whatnot, and Iris has to jump in and get it from him before his arms give out under the weight. She sets it all on the coffee table and appraises her spoils.

A couple of thick, tattered notebooks with a bunch of loose sheets sticking out of them; a paper envelope with what looks like photos inside; a heavy, leather-bound scrapbook; a thin square box chock full of newspaper clippings; and some plastic thing she vaguely recognizes as some sort of old sound recording. She thinks it’s called a “tape”.

Jared’s eyes light up when he sees it.

“That would be one of Lady Lilian’s radio appearances,” he says with a hint of pride, “I’ll go see if we still have a working cassette player.”

While Jared’s gone, Iris takes the envelope with the photos and spills them out all over the table. The wedding photo stands out immediately, her mother with her dark brown hair decorated with a veritable ton of flower ornaments, in the traditional white-and-yellow, and her father in his black-and-gold formal uniform, neither of them smiling. Lilian looks calm and determined, while Clarus has his strict military face on.

There’s a bunch of Lilian-and-little-Gladio pictures. She’s holding or hugging him in every single one, and smiling in most.

Then there’s the Lilian-and-Iris ones.

As she looks through them, Iris starts to get a feeling of déjà-vu. She can’t remember where she knows these pictures from, but she _knows_ them, knows this exact lighting and the paint on baby Iris’ face and the jam on her hands. She can’t possibly remember having those taken, she would’ve been three or younger, but the photos…

Jared comes back with a small and battered music player, and Iris zeroes in on him immediately.

“Did dad ever show these photos to me?”

Jared blinks.

“Not to my knowledge. I don’t imagine he would’ve been enthusiastic about it. Oh, but young Lord Gladiolus might have, perhaps?”

She hums in response and says, “Did you say my mom was on radio?”

It takes them maybe twenty minutes to listen to the whole thing. It’s a talk show about the war effort; the host is surprisingly sympathetic to her mother’s concern for her future children.

“We all know that if the war takes a sharp turn for the worse, the first to be drafted will be werewolves,” comes her mother’s voice, scratchy and cracking on the low-quality recording. “Almost no one except the wolves themselves sees anything wrong with that. That is the uncomfortable truth. Thankfully, His Majesty has always valued the lives of all Lucian citizens regardless of genetic makeup. Sadly, the same cannot be said for the Council.”

Then the host switches to the topic of refugees, and the recording cuts off.

“Is that what my mom did?” Iris asks. “I took a peek at the clippings when I was sorting through all this, and it’s like… Was she some sort of, uh, werewolf rights activist?”

It sounds really strange when she says it out loud; she cringes.

“Well, her approach would’ve been more subtle than that,” Jared smiles with humor, “but, in essence, yes. She advocated for fair treatment and equal rights.”

“Huh? I don’t think we’re _un_ equal, though. Not on a legal level, at least.”

Jared smiles, a little sadly. “Did you know that werewolves are not allowed to work in medicine or funeral services? It is an old law, based on an even older superstition that a werewolf will be compelled to eat any freshly dead body in its vicinity. And shops that sell meat often deny werewolf applicants for any job openings which involve dealing directly with the food.”

Iris didn’t know.

“Well, Lady Lilian might have bitten off more than she could chew,” says Jared quietly. “Those prejudices go centuries back. It will take far longer than a decade to eradicate them.”

The scrapbook turns out to be a collection of clippings that feature Lilian herself, carefully arranged, affixed to pages and dated; the notebooks, the manuscript of the book she had been writing on the issues between werewolves and humans, and the notes for it. Iris’ mother had done a lot of research, both on the legal and social side of things. Here and there, Jared’s notes on wolf folklore are taped to the pages. Old laws are cited; records of debates that had led to their being repealed or kept in place, noted. Some of it is probably buried in the archives still.

It’s a stunning amount of work.

Lying there, brought out of storage for the first time in gods know how long, it looks like wasted effort.

Iris would absolutely hate for it to have been a waste.

She packs the things back up and puts them away with Jared’s help – now that she knows where they are, it doesn’t matter if they stay there a little while longer.

It turns out that it’s harder to take a photo of a photo than might seem at first glance. She goes from room to room looking for decent light, and then spends a good thirty minutes editing the result with what she has on her phone. The photo she takes a picture of is the one with Gladio and sleeping Cor, where Gladio looks adorably focused on his sneaking and Cor is fluffier than a chocobo toy.

She posts it on QuikSnap – captions it with _“3…2…1…”_ and tags Gladio and a bunch of random people from school she still keeps in touch with. Cor doesn’t have an account; she’ll have to fix that.

Then she thinks for a minute and uploads the other photo as well, the one with puppy Gladio getting his comeuppance.

_“Retribution caught up to my little big bro!”_

And when her father comes home in the evening, she asks him,

“Hey, dad? Does the Crownsfang have a PR department?”

 _Just because we sometimes look like animals doesn’t mean we have to behave like them._ It was her dad’s favorite mantra for when she got particularly unruly as a kid, apparently.

She’ll keep saying it, too, until the rest of Lucis believes her.

“Huh? Gladio?”

Through her brother’s open bedroom door, Iris sees him bent over a duffel bag and stops short. Gladio has been coming home less and less, staying over at the Citadel all the time, and it’s not that she misses him, but…

Yeah, she’s missed him.

He looks over at her and says, “Hey.”

“Are you packing?”

“Mm-hm, got a trip coming up. Fang business.”

“Like, training camp?”

“Not really.”

She edges her way into the room, and when Gladio doesn’t bark at her to respect his private space, dammit, she perches on his ridiculously high bed, next to the bag he’s packing.

“I thought most of your clothes were over at the Citadel now.”

“Yeah, those are only good for the laundry basket.”

“Oh. Ew. Stinkbug,” she teases, and avoids a flick on the head with a well-practiced move. “Where are you going?”

“Sorry, kiddo. Classified.”

“Oh, come on. Stingus Stingius.”

“Ask me again when you’ve got clearance.”

It’s alright. Iris knows how to play this game.

Gladio keeps packing, and Iris keeps sitting there banging her calves against the side of the mattress, a rhythmic _thump-thump-thump-thump_ , and makes the most innocent face she can muster. It’s a good one: she’s got years of practice.

After a minute of that, Gladio heaves a sigh, rolls his eyes and says, “Tenebrae,” like someone would say, _Here’s your ice cream, now leave me alone_.

“Oooh! What’s going on in Tenebrae?”

“Don’t really know,” he says with badly concealed disgruntlement, and Iris gets the feeling he knows but isn’t telling her. “Diplomacy.”

“You gonna be a while?”

“Don’t know that either. Be back when they’re done talking, I guess. Shouldn’t be too long.”

Iris sits, and Gladio packs. She doesn’t know about Gladio, but she appreciates the company, after long days with no one but Jared at home.

Finally, Gladio asks, one eyebrow raised, “You really wanna watch me pack my underwear?”

She fires back with, “Does it have embarrassing patterns on it?” Then, an idea strikes. “Oh, hey, Gladdy, come ’ere.”

“Why?” Gladio asks, with deep-seated and fully-warranted suspicion.

“Selfie time, c’mon!”

She scurries over to his side, and her behemoth of a brother props his hard freaking chin on the top of her head, which is uncomfortable as all heck. Whatever. A sacrifice in the name of the greater good.

“Make me look dumb and you’ll regret it,” he mumbles without really moving his jaw.

“You’d never know,” she whispers back and takes the shot.

He’d never actually make her regret it.

She captions it, _“My fav big bro <3 Selfies are Important Crownsfang Business ™ _(ﻭ >ᴗ<)ﻭ _”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holy crap did I struggle with this one. Social commentary is so not my thing, and Iris is a side character, too, so very little main plot involves her. Sorry if this chapter kinda sucks or feels filler-ish. I just wanted all Amicitia wolves to have a chapter each, I dunno. Whatever, what’s done is done. Next chapter should be interesting.
> 
> In other news: The Fic That Shall Not Be Named is almost done and I hate it and I love it and my brain is melting god-effing-damn send help


	6. To stalk one's bounds,

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hate writing dialogue, just fyi. Also, fair warning, this chapter is a Gladnoct shitfest and the only part I'm satisfied with is Gladio's internal struggle. Oh well. TisShrug.

**Chapter 5. To stalk one's bounds,  
**

Gladio doesn’t get ten years. He doesn’t even get five.

Princess Lunafreya Nox Fleuret, prim and proper and delicate as a flower, sits across the table from an apathetic-seeming Noctis. Next to them, in a similar juxtaposition, sit Queen Sylva, in the Fleuret white, and King Regis, in the Lucis Caelum black. On the other side of the queen sits Ravus, Tenebrae’s crown prince, wearing a bored mien on par with Noct’s best, but with a dollop of carefully concealed annoyance.

Gladio stands by the wall behind Noct’s chair, next to Arnis, and watches the royals dine.

The conversation is the kind of high-society small talk that precludes negotiations in the noble circles. “Oh, how have your children been, Lady Sylva”, “Have you been in good health, Lord Regis”, “Fenestala Manor is every bit as exquisite as I remember”, “I am glad to see Prince Noctis has grown up well”. To an outsider ear, it all sounds like meaningless platitudes.

Gladio knows they’re feeling each other out. It’s a fine art, to be blunt enough to hit the sore spots and also subtle enough to seem like you’re not aiming at them. Most nobles have it mastered by adulthood through sheer necessity. It’s as much of a survival skill as, say, budgeting.

When your sore spots are being gently soothed or avoided entirely instead of jabbed at, it’s a big indicator.

As far as Gladio can tell, this is less of a spar and more of a platonic petting session.

His Majesty and Queen Sylva go way back, judging by their conversation. It seems that Regis had been a visitor in Tenebrae at some point in his youth, when Niflheim’s activity was at a lull, and his relationship with Tenebrae’s crown princess at the time had been… warm.

“Honestly, though, Regis, you know I’d be happy to offer you my services as the Oracle. Don’t be cruel to yourself,” the queen chides in a gentle tone; Regis maintains an expression of polite neutrality.

“I am most grateful for your concern,” he replies.

“Stubbornly independent as always, I see,” says Sylva with an exasperated little smile, and the king sighs, defeated and put-upon.

“Sylva,” he complains. The queen just looks smug.

The conversation devolves rapidly after that, into affectionate name-calling and rose-hued reminiscence. Tenebrae’s crown prince watches the spectacle with the sort of face that’s trying very hard not to grow eyes to the size of dinner plates; the princess, rather unsuccessfully, hides her titters behind her hand. Gladio can’t see Noct’s face, but he can just imagine the tamped-down befuddlement.

They’ll put all this warmth aside tomorrow, when it’s time to hammer out deals and play the political tug-of-war, but for now, this dinner is no battlefield.

The crown prince eventually simmers back down to polite boredom, and the princess seems to only leave half a mind to pay to the monarchs’ banter. The other half, it looks like, is on Noct.

“It is a pity you’ve never been to Tenebrae before,” she says to him, and Noctis jolts a bit. “I’m sure you would have found the waterfalls interesting. I hear you are fond of fishing?”

“Ah, uh, yeah,” Noct stammers, like this is his first formal exchange with a high-ranking noble. Gladio can’t hold back the eyeroll, but at least he does it subtly.

When his gaze is back on the table moments after, the princess is looking him straight in the eye.

A cold jolt goes down Gladio’s spine.

For a split second, the princess’ pleasant smile turns mischievous, and then it goes back to normal, and then she’s looking at Noct again like she’d never looked away in the first place. And Gladio is left wondering if he’d imagined all that.

He glances sideways at Arnis, but the man is focused on the king and doesn’t seem to have noticed.

“I’ve little interest in fishing myself,” the princess says, smooth as butter, “but I have spent some time exploring the parks around the manor in my childhood. I could show you some pleasant waterside spots, if you’d like.”

Noct seems to have recovered, because he says, “It would be a pleasure,” in his best diplomatic voice. “Perhaps tomorrow?”

“I’d be delighted,” she smiles. “I was hoping, however, that we could talk a little before that. Would you be free for a chat after dinner?”

“Of course,” Noct agrees politely; freakin’ graciously.

It’s like he hadn’t lied in bed, exhausted beyond measure, and held himself together by sheer force of will.

“He’s looking for some sort of alliance against Niflheim,” Noct had told him long after his lunch with Regis, late at night and on the verge of passing right out. “We know they’ve been bothering Tenebrae as well, disrupting trade and agriculture and whatnot. He’s going to bank on mutual benefits. Maybe offer to share some of our tech, since they’re kind of behind. Might need to have me marry their queen’s daughter to really clinch it. Lunafreya.”

He’d said it like it was nothing special; or, well, he’d tried, at least, but his voice had broken a bit over the princess’ name.

Gladio couldn’t find anything to say.

They fell asleep clinging to each other that night.

Noct was trying so hard to put on a brave front before the trip. He still is, but Gladio can see the exhaustion seeping through. Except maybe for the king, he’s probably the only one here who can.

The sooner this day ends, the better.

They eat dinner ridiculously early in Tenebrae – something like five in the evening – but state dinners always take longer than any normal meal. Gladio really should’ve foreseen that. Now it’ll be a miracle if he can get the two dozen Fangs in his care settled in time, and it’ll be no one’s fault but his.

Regis and the queen relocate to a parlor to get reasonably drunk on something strong under the pretense of socializing. Prince Ravus stalks off to do his own thing. Noct and the princess set out to find a room with a garden view.

Gladio puts Arnis on prince duty, ignores the indecipherable look the lieutenant gives him, and goes to get Fang radios sorted.

He spends the better part of an hour arguing with a tech pretending to be dumber than they really are (“Look, I just want something that _works_ – what do you _mean,_ you don’t use radio communications? Do you just send runners everywhere? …Seriously?”), then another fifteen minutes with an enthusiastic intern-ish youth who promises to rig up a net control station by morning. There’s no way to get hold of Arnis without the radios, so yet another fifteen minutes are sacrificed to asking around and following vague directions in a tall, unfamiliar palace.

Apparently, a “room with a garden view” can be literally anywhere when you have a castle shaped like a wedding cake with trees planted on every available surface.

Something flickers across Arnis’ face when he sees Gladio approach. After the last hour and a half, Gladio couldn’t care less.

“Hey,” Gladio says. “I’ll take it from here.”

“Sure, sure. Hey, uh… How you holdin’ up, Cap Junior?” Arnis asks quietly, trying to look nonchalant while giving Gladio concerned sideways glances. “With the – you know,” he trails off awkwardly, nodding to some abstract point behind the door he’s guarding.

Oh, he can’t be serious.

“Got nothing to be holding up against, do I,” Gladio says pointedly, looking Arnis straight in the eye.

Arnis averts his gaze immediately.

“Hey, it’s okay,” he says. “We’re with you, Amicitia. If you need to talk, I know how to keep my mouth shut. Ain’t no wolf ever gonna rat you out to the baldies.”

Aaand he’s taking it out on his colleagues. _Great going, Amicitia._

“Thanks,” he sighs. “Don’t think I really want to talk about anything.”

“Whatever you say,” says Arnis, and it’s entirely too understanding for Gladio’s tolerance.

They step in to announce the shift change; Gladio introduces himself.

“Thank you,” the princess smiles. On the settee across from her, Noct looks like he’s about to say something, but stops himself at the last moment.

Before Gladio can follow Arnis back outside, though, he notices a sudden commotion in the far corner of the room.

There, by the tall glass doors opening into the palace gardens, a pair of dogs that had been napping suddenly perks up and then bounds over to Gladio in a deafening frenzy of happy barks and yips. They all but mow him down to the ground, and Gladio has to brace himself to remain standing. Behind him, he hears Arnis muffle a snort.

“Umbra, Pryna! Down!”

Like a switch had been flipped, the dogs relent and step back, and Gladio can take a breath.

“To me,” the princess commands, and with only a little reluctance, both dogs trot over and take up positions on either side of her.

“My apologies,” she addresses Gladio, smiling politely. “They do not normally react to strangers with such interest. I assure you, they meant you no harm.”

“It’s alright,” says Gladio. “Must be the smell of dog on me.”

The princess’ eyes honest-to-Six light up.

“Do you keep one as well, by chance?”

Gladio hesitates, looks at Noct; Noctis just shrugs.

Well. Alright then.

“More like I _am_ the dog, Your Highness,” he corrects her. “I’d show you, but – I’m afraid the clothes would make it awkward.”

“It is true, then?” she asks, an expression of awed surprise on her face. “About the canine protectors of Lucis? I’d thought them a fairy tale, or an urban legend.” For a little while, she observes Gladio with open curiosity. He isn’t sure if she’s seeing anything other than just another dog.

“It must be wonderful, having such a loyal companion by your side,” she says, and the glint in her eyes is the same as the one Gladio noticed at dinner. Mischievous, and knowing.

Gladio is very, very suspicious of that glint.

Despite his insistence that he’s on the job and that he can’t tell her much that isn’t classified, she gets him to stay and grills him for information with the persistence of a long-time dog enthusiast. He doesn’t sit, out of pure stubbornness. It doesn’t feel like an interrogation, but it’s Gladio’s job to be suspicious and expect the worst of people. He doles out bits and pieces, and curiosity keeps shining in the princess’ eyes, and he finds himself – not liking her, that’s most likely never happening, but here and now, she’s almost exactly like Noct gets when he talks about fishing.

He loves it when Noct gets excited like that.

Eventually, it gets dark outside, and the lights come on. Princess Lunafreya puts a stop to her questions and decides to retire for the night. The dogs go with her.

And then it’s just Gladio and Noct standing in an unfamiliar parlor, with cold tea and some finger foods remaining on the coffee table.

With a gusty sigh, Noct collapses back onto the settee. When Gladio doesn’t move, he raises a sharp eyebrow and glares until Gladio sits, and then he glares some more when Gladio sits in an armchair instead of next to him.

“We’re on foreign ground here, Noct,” Gladio rumbles at him. “Be careful, for fuck’s sake.”

Noct huffs with irritation, but tones the glaring down.

“I’ve talked to Lunafreya,” he says, voice low and serious. “She’s not any happier about getting married than I am. We’ve worked out some other ways to symbolize the alliance that we can offer to our parents tomorrow, one of them should stick.”

Gladio processes that for a little bit. Is _that_ what they were talking about the whole time he was solving Crownsfang problems? It seems like a reasonable topic, and, frankly, some part of him is glad that Noct is trying to find a way out of the situation. Another part, the paranoid, bodyguard part, feels like if Lucis doesn’t deliver on its intentions, the whole alliance thing will fall through.

There’s no guarantee to anything. He asks, “And if it doesn’t?”

“Then we go through with it in appearance only,” Noct replies, immediate. “Like I said, she doesn’t want to get married either. Doesn’t want a relationship or anything like that. So if we do end up married, we’ll work something out that doesn’t involve me cheating on you.”

“Keep your voice down,” Gladio hisses frantically. “Did you tell her?”

“I told her I had _someone,_ ” Noct fires back. “She told me first that she had zero interest in sex and relationships and all that, we both have dirt on each other, it’s _fine_.”

Gladio could strangle him.

“She’s an unknown quantity,” he whispers furiously. “And did you seriously just give up ‘dirt’ on yourself like that? An affair is a much bigger shitbomb than a woman not being into sex. A woman from a holy line, at that.”

“We have a common goal,” Noct parries.

“And what about when you don’t?!”

“Then I’ll say it’s just an attempt to start a rumor. She has no proof anyway. They don’t have concealable recorders in Tenebrae yet.”

Gladio sighs. Why is Noct being such a bonehead tonight?

“We’re in foreign territory, in an unfamiliar building. You have no idea who could be listening.”

Noct retorts, “And what proof would they have except for their own word?”

“Words used to be worth a lot, before recorders were invented.”

“Gladio,” Noctis says like _would you listen to me, you big lug_ , “Cut it out. We can deny just about anything to the public, and I can handle a few stuck-up councilors. We just have to make sure they don’t include any weird clauses in the compact, and we’ll be fine.”

_We_. As in, he and Noct, _we_. Gladio reads that loud and clear.

In all of this, Noct still thinks them a _we_.

He asks, tired, “What about your vows?”

“What vows,” Noct deadpans.

“You know, the vows you’d have to take before your future wife?” Gladio snarks. “Those vows. You going to take them and then break them?”

“You know I don’t say shit I don’t mean,” Noctis frowns.

“So?”

“So I’ll just say the things I do mean. Custom vows are all the rage these days.”

“The important parts are usually about fidelity and shit.”

“The parts where I declare my undying love and loyalty for one person until the day one of us dies?”

“Yeah, those parts.”

“Alright,” Noctis says, and a strange, resolute expression comes over his face, like he’s heading to battle. “Alright. From this day on, and until the day one of us lies dead and buried, I will devote my life as a man to no other. I will love and cherish as my spouse no other. On my name as Noctis Lucis Caelum, so I do swear.” Finished, he sits back, still serious. “There. Now I’d have to break these if I were to say them to Lunafreya.”

Gladio blinks.

“What?”

Noctis huffs a sigh through his nose and only sort-of glares.

“I don’t say shit I don’t mean, Gladio. So. I meant all that. What I said to you.”

Gladio blinks again.

Meant all that. Now. Here. With just the two of them sitting in a room. The vows he claims he wouldn’t say to Princess Lunafreya. Meant them.

He sags forward and buries his head in his hands.

“Holy shit, Noct,” he mumbles. His voice sounds hoarse. Why? Noctis had just… He had only… “Are you – “ _for real_ , he wants to say, but he glances up at Noct before he does and the face he’s making makes it very, very clear that yes, he is. Yeah. Okay. Okay. That’s…

There’s only one answer Gladio can give without lying.

“Fine,” he forces out of himself. He feels like a cornered animal, and this is not – this is not what marriage is supposed to be about for either of them. This is – so far out of left field, and so _strange_ and so nothing Gladio had ever even thought about. He’d made his vows to Noct as his Shield, and those are as binding to him as any contract, even more than that, but this is – this is personal, this is –

This is surrender.

He can’t make himself break this.

Fuck his family duties, he _can’t_. This is _Noct._

From the start, there had only been one way to go.

“Fine,” he repeats, suddenly bone-tired. He’s disappointed in himself and he can’t force it down, and he feels like he truly belongs with someone for what seems like the first time in his life. There’s no taking this back. “I’m all yours, anyway. You tell me to heel, I’ll fucking heel.”

All of him. No going back. Not until one of them’s dead.

Gladio knows this in his gut.

Noctis is silent for a long time, until Gladio looks up again. When he does, Noct is wearing a sort of pinched expression, the kind Gladio doesn’t see often.

Slowly, in a weak, half-strangled voice, Noct begins to say, “If you’re just going to resent me for this – ”

“Not what I meant,” Gladio interrupts. “I meant – I’m yours.” _Ain’t that the truth_. “You could put me in the ground, and I’d be happy it was your hand that left me there.”

It’s not exactly normal, this sort of devotion. Gladio is aware enough to realize this.

Maybe Noct was right, all those years ago, when he met Gladio for the first time and called him “doggy”. Maybe there’s not enough wolf left in him by this point. The Amicitias would have been bred for loyalty, no? Wouldn’t that have made them dogs by this point?

Noctis relaxes in increments as he processes Gladio’s words.

“Good,” he says, sort of dazed. “I mean – uh,” and then he huffs gustily and slides down until he can rest his head on the back of the sofa.

“I know,” Gladio grins through the whirling mess of fear and uncertainty in his mind. He does know. He could decipher Noct when he was an awkward teenager barely stringing two thoughtful words together; this is a good deal more than what he had to work with before. Noct’s happy with this. That’s good. That’s enough. They’ll deal with everything else as it comes.

And Gladio will stay by his side, like the loyal dog he is.

He hates himself for it, a little. For being reduced to this blind dedication. It’s nobody’s fault, not even his own, no matter how much he tries to blame himself. His Shield vows, tied deeply into his core as they are, came from without, initially. They were sanctioned. This is different – this is between the two of them and outside of all supposed norms and Gladio would do and say it all again if anyone asked.

He’s all Noct’s. There’s no way around that cornerstone. His moral compass can just shut the fuck up.

Noct smiles back at him with such softness that he doesn’t even need to say _I love you_ out loud.

With a sigh, Gladio leans back and lets the tension trickle out of his spine. Now that everything’s said and done, it seems almost funny. A snort bubbles out of him.

Noct looks at him like he’s lost his marbles for a second, and then starts giggling himself.

They’re something, alright. Making vows in the middle of a foreign country’s royal parlor, over cold tea and half-eaten pastries.

It’s nice.

Laughter contained, but grin still in place, Gladio jokes, “You willing to risk going down in history as the Unfaithful?”

In a put-on, over-the-top snooty voice, Noct says, “What should I care if my country resents me as long as I leave it better than I got it?” Somehow, he still looks serious while saying it.

Gladio has nothing to counter that. He also falls in love with Noct a little more. Those two things are entirely, honestly unrelated.

If Lucis ever turns on Noct, Gladio will just turn on Lucis. That’s all there is to it.

Then

something _booms_ in the near distance and the entire building _trembles_ and the teacups clatter, and Gladio’s blood runs cold.

He doesn’t know the sound of explosions first-hand, but there’s very little doubt in him at the moment.

On the edge of his hearing, there’s a low, mechanical, whining sort of sound.

That sound, he knows. Second-hand, sure, but it’s damn distinctive.

It’s the sound of magitek engines.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dun-dun-DUUUUUN
> 
> And no Wednesday update for you guys next time, muahhahahahaaa. Honestly, though, I’ve got some serious things cooking, and those take time. Plot’s gonna pick up like whoa.
> 
> :)


	7. To weave a crown of triumphant sounds,

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heyyy action
> 
> For the record, I have nothing against Tenebrae.

**Chapter 7. To weave a crown of triumphant sounds,**

The halls are in a state of barely organized chaos.

Going up would be driving yourself into a corner, so they go down. Gladio keeps himself between Noct and the windows, taking glances at the dark skyline while they dart past. At least one airship is still hovering, glowing red.

Manor staff rushes to and fro with no discernible purpose as Gladio and Noct make their way towards the ground floor, or what passes for it in this mess of a building. There seems to be no logic to the layout at all. Some stairs only go up while others only go down, some are straight while others spiral and some curve and some bend. There are no nice, convenient ways straight up or down like in the Citadel, no clear separation between different parts of the building, no apparent order to _anything_. He’s a Lucian, he’s lived in carefully constructed order his entire life. This, for him, is as good as a maze.

A very pretty maze, he’ll grant it, but pretty won’t get them to safety quicker or stand in the way of Niflheim shots.

Tenebrae, the land of poets and artists and shitty organization.

There’s a flash outside one of the windows as they pass it, and then the sound of impact and the building trembles again; the lights flicker. Gladio grabs Noct by the shoulder and holds on tight until the shaking abates.

They go down another level.

The gorgeous filigree arches of the manor’s ceilings seem about to collapse over their heads with every blast that strikes. By the time they get, by Gladio’s estimation, about midway down, there had been another three. They’d pushed through those, too wary to stop.

Gladio catches himself reaching for where his radio earpiece should be and is reminded yet again that this is a no-comms sitch. Fuck.

He’s flying so blind here, it’s really not funny. Sure, there are procedures for these sorts of situations and Gladio keeps up with them religiously, but reading about FUBARs and unexpectedly finding yourself in the middle of one are two completely different things. Contacting his superiors is out because, one, no comms, and two, Gladio is the highest-ranking Crownsfang officer in the city. Technically, Arnis is the same rank, but he’s supposed to defer in conflict, so, yeah. No fallbacks there. The king could always do the job, but Gladio would have to locate him first, and that’s a tall order, too, because there are _no fucking comms._

Six above, he’ll be reaming so many asses for having no backup comm system.

His own ass is likely to be at the top of that list.

Now that he’s thinking of it, finding Regis sounds like a pretty good idea to him. The king would have his own Fangs with him, and no doubt Queen Sylva’s guardsmen would be around, but Gladio would rather confirm His Majesty’s wellbeing personally, or at least second-hand. He’d have sent a Fang to do it, but they haven’t come across a single one on their way through the manor.

Where _are_ they, the mutts?

Gladio is debating the merits of shifting and sniffing out Regis’ scent when something beyond the upcoming turn shatters – he’d bet on a window – and, almost in the same moment, something very heavy, but not very large, crashes into the floor or the wall, he can’t be sure.

Noct stops all on his own, without Gladio holding him back, and summons a sword. Gladio signals him to stay put, pulls up a shield for himself and creeps forward on silent feet to peer beyond the corner.

It’s an MT.

Gladio makes _absolutely_ sure he doesn’t breathe too loudly.

He’s only ever seen them in recordings before – shaky, grainy clips made by an amateur hand on some recon mission or other. They had mostly showed these things in groups, doing some sort of work or standing guard, either moving mechanically or standing stock still in a way no living being could manage. None of those clips had exactly been close-ups.

It looks so much weirder up close.

As he watches, it uncurls from its cannonball shape with a whiny sound, not unlike that of the magitek engines, and starts to look relatively humanoid. Arms, legs, creepy red lights for eyes under the helmet’s visor, the works.

And then its head swivels around in a decidedly non-humanoid way and looks straight at Gladio.

He jerks back behind the corner –

and hears its feet clang closer.

Shit. Shit. Shit. What now? It’s noticed him. They have to get past it. There’s no time to look for a way around. They’ll have to take it out. Offense is the best defence?

He shoves his panic away and makes eye contact with Noct.

Noct, to his credit, doesn’t look as scared as he could be.

Gladio cuts diagonally downward with his free hand to signal _fight_ , and Noct nods and grips his sword tighter.

Fuck. Okay. Fuck.

He’ll get drunk when they get home and then keep Noct in bed for a week.

Gladio sends the shield away and summons his best greatsword instead. He’ll need both hands to swing that thing properly.

He’ll need space, too.

Armed and ready, feet set, Noct safely behind him, Gladio stands in the middle of the hallway and waits.

The steps clang closer.

The thing rounds the corner, suddenly whines even louder and, from seemingly nowhere, draws a pair of swords.

Double fuck.

No way around.

He charges.

It’s hard to get traction on the well-polished marble floors. When Gladio blocks a swing, the force behind it pushes him backwards and his boots slide a little. There’s movement on the other side of him, though, and when he looks, he realizes the block he raised by muscle memory alone didn’t account for dual weapons. Well, shit.

With a screech of metal against metal, he goes to adjust his sword, but the stupid machine keeps pushing, and he struggles with every inch. It’s too slow. From the corner of his eye, Gladio notices it raise its other arm to strike sideways and has just enough time to brace for impact.

The impact, when it comes, happens with a ringing clang against the shield Noct brings up in the nick of time.

Gladio doesn’t give his heart the time to flip the fuck out – he catches the moment Noct’s move unbalances the robot and pushes forward and up so his feet don’t slide again. The sword-arm bearing down on him gets flung away; the thing teeters, gets a firm kick to the chest from Gladio, but then finds its balance and stays standing.

Barely.

They have to take this chance.

Gladio slams his sword down on the thing’s feet; from behind him, Noct runs up his bent back, pivots into a one-eighty at take-off and sticks his own sword between the MT’s neck-plate and helmet on the way down.

It’s a nice, dragoon-style move. Noct’s always been proud of it.

Noct’s sword strikes with a mother of all metallic shrieks, but the MT is taller than him, so when it begins to topple backwards, a result of his and Gladio’s applied force, Noct lets go of the handle in surprise and stumbles back. It goes down with a crash and yet another machinic whine and doesn’t move anymore.

Well.

Alright.

That’s that, then.

Gladio notices his own heavy breathing, and then Noct’s. And then the high-pitched building-up sound coming from the robot prone at Noct’s feet.

_Shit._ “Move!”

Noct startles and takes a few wild steps away from it, and Gladio darts aside before the rest of him can catch up to his lizard brain. He goes to Noct then, shield out and aimed at the screeching MT.

They huddle in wait for one second, two, three – and peek out in puzzlement when the sounds die down and then vanish completely.

The creepy red glow of its eyes is gone.

The thing lies still. And then keeps lying still for a breath, two, five.

For a long moment, he and Noct just look at each other, minds empty and bodies shaking from the leftover adrenaline. They are absolutely, one hundred percent shaking. If Gladio had any less pride, he’d collapse.

Noct, for all that he seems to be shaking even more than Gladio, is just as much of a stubborn shit.

Gladio still lops the MT’s head off for good measure.

Those fancy marble floors are going to need repairs.

He takes a deep breath and refocuses his thoughts. They’ve dealt with one of these creepy Nif things, but no one would just send in one. There’ll be others.

There’s no telling if they can handle more than one, but they have to keep moving.

If the Nifs are sending troops in instead of just bombarding the manor from the outside, and if their commanders have any brains at all, they’ll be deploying some MTs at the top and setting up a blockade at the bottom to catch anyone who gets flushed out. It’s a pretty basic tactic. Gladio just might luck out, though, and the enemy command will be complete idiots.

A man can hope, but he knows better than to count on it.

If there _is_ a blockade down at the ground floor, perhaps they can make it out through a window. The manor has these rooftop gardens-slash-balconies just about everywhere. It’s dark out. They could find a way down, slip by. Maybe.

He would kill for some advice right now.

“Fuck, Gladio, we have to find dad,” says Noct with a subdued urgency.

Gladio nods in response, sharp and serious.

His pride will just have to take one for the team, because Gladio has to admit, at least to himself, that he is sorely underequipped to deal with this on his own.

Find the king it is.

He tries to do a partial shift for his sense of smell alone, but it’s like balancing a coin on top of a soap bubble. You slip one way, you lose it, you slip the other, you go wolf. Iris has a knack for finding that balance. Gladio doesn’t. That’s just how it is. And right now, they can’t rely on luck alone to bring them to Regis.

“I’m gonna shift,” he tells Noct. “Try and track His Majesty down by scent. If I can’t catch it here, we’ll have to go back to that dining room.” If he can’t pick up a scent _there_ , well. They’ll go with the original plan – get out of the building before it buries them alive and regroup with the rest of the Crownsfang.

To think Gladio had been wishing for the day to be over just a few hours ago.

Be careful what you wish for, indeed.

The varied scents that assault Gladio’s nose are, most to least prominent: hot metal tinged with something acidic, stone dust, something like flowers or greenery or whatever, Noct’s skin-sweat-male-adrenaline smell, a vague hint of clean laundry, and a familiar smell he’s come to associate with the Citadel.

He finds the slippery thread of that Citadel scent, chuffs at Noct to follow, and goes.

What he finds, after traversing two more staircases and ending up on the same level they were before, but in a different section, is a Fang, wolfed-out and determinedly trotting away from them. The wolf’s ear twitches, and it raises its head to look.

Blue collar, three stripes. First lieutenant. Arnis.

Gladio forgot to put on his own collar, but the scar across his eye should be pretty distinctive, and Noct’s with him, besides. He huffs at Arnis in greeting, and Arnis huffs back.

Arnis beckons them closer with a jerk of his head, and when Gladio comes near, he gets the point: there’s another Citadel smell there that’s not Arnis.

_Regis?_ Gladio tries to ask, but doesn’t have time to get an answer. Another blast rocks the manor then, and one of the panes in a nearby window cracks and falls out partway. It’s a window that opens onto the main courtyard.

There’s a battle going on.

Gladio’s legs bring him to the window before his brain can catch up. Outside is lit only by the yard lampposts and the Nif ships’ red glow, but his wolf eyes can’t see red, and everything looks bright as day to him anyway.

There’s a good dozen or so wolves down there, going up against easily twice as many robots. It’s the blockade; it must be. The Nif blockade, and the Fang troops. Some of the manor guard is there, too, fussing about at the fringes and waving their fancy spears and halberds around. None of Gladio’s wolves have their protective vests on. It makes sense – someone would’ve had to have thought about it first, and this is as urgent a deployment as it gets, there would’ve been no time to think.

Fuck.

Gladio’s responsible for those idiots.

He’s responsible for Noct and His Majesty, too.

Fuck.

Then he hears footsteps, and Arnis barks to get his attention, and when he turns to look, there’s a full party of Regis, Queen Sylva, four manor guards and two Fangs coming over to greet them.

Oh thank the sweet minty Six.

Gladio turns his back on them to shift and drape a cloak around himself. There’s a stock of them in the Armory for this very purpose, long and heavy, with nice, handy catches squarely at groin level. Arnis looks at him questioningly, and Gladio shakes his head. Arnis can stay wolf for now. No need for extra awkwardness.

Queen Sylva, to her credit, doesn’t bat an eye at Gladio’s shifting or at his attire.

“Evacuations should be underway for the manor,” the queen tells them while Noct checks in with his father. “We had foreseen this possibility. There are ways of retreat that should let us pass unnoticed.”

Gladio automatically looks to Noct.

He knows what Noct is capable of, he’s seen it first hand in training earlier and in action just now, but if he can get Noct out of here without any unnecessary risk, all the better. That’ll be one worry less, at least.

“Noct,” he calls, and Noctis looks to him already frowning, like he knows what Gladio’s going to say and disapproves in advance. “You should get yourself to safety.”

“Yeah, no.”

_And here we go._

“Noct – “

“I can fight. Our side is smaller in number as it is, we should press every advantage we have – “

“You’re the next in line! Lucis needs you safe, not losing your life in a conflict that’s not even about you.”

“Isn’t it?” Noctis raises a very expressive eyebrow, skepticism and a dare in one disgruntled package. “Their timing’s extremely convenient, is all I’m saying.”

“That’s even more reason for you to stay away. Your Majesty, you as well.”

Regis raises an eyebrow that’s every bit as expressive as Noct’s. In the privacy of his own mind, Gladio decides to call it the Caelum eyebrow.

“While I agree that you should stay away from the fighting, Noctis,” says Regis, ignoring the face Noct’s making like an expert parent, “I have full intention to participate.”

“I cannot allow that, Your Majesty,” Gladio says before his brain can catch up to his mouth, and then he has to try very, very hard not to let his face contort in dread.

“Oh?” Regis hums.

There are layers upon layers in that one ‘oh’.

In for a cent, in for a crown, is that what they say?

“I can’t guarantee yours and the prince’s safety while also leading a defense against a Niflheim assault,” Gladio says, one part professionalism and one part bravado. “I have to ask you and His Highness to do your part in keeping yourselves alive and unharmed by keeping your distance from Fang operations.”

For a long second, Regis stares at him hard enough to drill holes in his face. Gladio wants to fold his ears down, but he’s in the wrong shape.

At last, Regis sighs, “Every inch Clarus’ son,” and something inside Gladio unclenches in relief. “Very well. Clarus sent his most experienced Fangs with us. They should have no trouble against an enemy that size. If any of them do lose their lives or suffer injuries, however,” he turns serious, grave, even, “it will be on their acting commander’s head – your head, Gladiolus. The moment I judge that further inaction on my part will lead to unacceptable loss of Lucian life, I will get involved one way or another.”

Gladio really should learn to quit while he’s ahead when arguing with a direct superior. Part of it is him forgetting that Regis isn’t Noct, sure, but part is definitely based on Regis and Clarus’ own relationship.

In other words, totally not his fault.

“My father always says that no loss is unacceptable when weighed against your king’s life,” he says, even though he probably shouldn’t. Scratch that, definitely shouldn’t.

“Your father,” the king enunciates with some exasperation, “could stand to take his king’s informed opinion into account.”

“He is still the standing authority on your safety, Your Majesty.”

Regis sighs again and shakes his head, but there’s a hint of humor on his face, too.

“You’ll have so much trouble with this one, Noctis,” he tells his son while hiding a smile in the corner of his mouth.

With the queen’s help, they figure out a spot from where Regis and his guards can safely observe the fight and intervene if necessary. Gladio directs Arnis and another Fang to stay with the king. He’ll send someone lower in rank over later, but for now, he needs someone competent on this job.

When Noct goes to follow his father, Gladio wolfs back out and throws the cloak in the armory in one fell swoop. It’ll be easier to get where he needs to go like this. He’s got shit to do.

He looks back.

Noct’s looking at him, too.

Of course he is.

That’s all there is to it.

Without really intending to, Gladio tries to tell him, _Stay safe_. It won’t work; Noct’s no wolf.

But Noct’s eyes widen for a second, and then he nods and mouths something like, _You too_ , and Gladio would swear he heard it, even though there’d been no sound.

Nobody knows how it works, really.

Gladio’s got shit to do.

Noct had damn well better not have a scratch on him after this.

One thing Regis was right about – the Fangs definitely know what they’re doing.

Fang teams are formed and trained to work together under any conditions, including comm silence and loss of leader. Even apart, they’re a force.

Together, they’re supposed to be worth an army.

Gladio’s here to make that happen, one way or another.

The hot metal smell of MTs is everywhere. Gladio crouches on a pedestal behind some statue, scans the courtyard-slash-palace-square thing they’ve got between the manor and the gates, and finds an officer on the sidelines who doesn’t look busy.

_Round up our stragglers,_ Gladio tells him when the officer trots over. _I want us all here except the king’s guard._

And then it’s time to get things done.

He wastes precious minutes figuring out how to go about it. Most no-comms protocols were written for premeditated situations, such as recon ops, and the ones that weren’t, boil down to finding your nearest superior and waiting for orders. There’s nothing that covers fucked-up situations like this one, when you’re in the middle of a fight and no orders are incoming.

Why had he never bothered the instructors with ‘what-if’s in officer training?

Gladio’s going to have to figure this out on the fly.

He could shift back to human and shout orders from where he’s perched, sure, but no one would hear him in this clamor. ‘Wolf telepathy’ could work, but the range is limited, and Gladio’s pretty sure it needs eye contact to work. He’d have to get close.

He’ll need a plan first.

What he ends up doing is this: work his way towards a team, wait for an opening, tell them where he wants them and what he wants them doing, move on. It’s inefficient as all hell, but it’s about the only thing he can do. He has to keep backing out, rearing up and checking the state of affairs.

Six-fucking-damn, in Lucis, he would’ve had comms, cameras and live updates on everything, not to mention a whole crew of people keeping the whole thing running.

_Stop whining_ , Gladio tells himself. _You’ve got what you’ve got_.

It takes some time to rearrange everyone, but once it’s done, it doesn’t take long at all to begin to push the robots back. Gladio observes the results of his work with plenty of pride and a little bit of relief. He’s got a decent war machine going, with different teams set to different tasks – some are separating enemy forces while others keep them contained and yet others methodically take the MTs out. It won’t work for very long, because you can’t make a reliable machine with living and thinking parts, but it just might work long enough to get them out of this mess.

_Or maybe not_ , he thinks as new magitek ships begin to float closer and drop off reinforcements.

He’s too tired to swear.

He needs to do _something_ , and that something better turn this fight around.

One of the ships goes to hover right above the courtyard, and Gladio gets a terrible, _horrible_ idea.

The Fang he sends his idea to, a large, bulky wolf catching their breath right beneath the hovering ship, looks at Gladio as if he’s completely lost his mind, complete with the folded-back ears and the full-body recoil. He shifts, though, as per Gladio’s request, and laces his fingers in front of himself, getting ready.

“You’re fuckin’ crazy, Amicitia,” the guy yells at him.

Gladio does some quick calculations and eyeballing, finds the right spot, and bolts.

A human man wouldn’t be able to throw a two-hundred-pound wolf up into the air on his own, however jacked and trained that man may be. It’s a tricky thing. Gladio needs to gain most of the momentum by himself and keep all of it before he jumps. All he really needs the help for is redirecting it.

Front legs. Hind legs. Gladio isn’t exactly built for speed, but he’ll squeeze all he can out of his body.

Front paws.

Hind paws.

Coil.

Jump.

For a weightless, heart-stopping moment, he _soars_.

Then comes the understanding that he’s just that little bit short on altitude, and his heart skips a beat for a completely different reason.

He slams into the sloped edge of the opening chest-first, head and forelegs inside, but hind legs scrabbling against the cold metal of the hatch. Almost immediately, his hold on the ship’s floor begins to slip.

Muscle memory takes over.

Hind paws to the wall. Kick out. Twist. Vault. Roll. Come up swinging.

Gladio tears the robots apart like tissue paper.

The Lucian werewolves are not like your normal wolves, is the thing. When human, they’re all the way human. But when wolf?

When wolf, those fangs crunch steel rods like twigs.

The ship is empty of MTs within a minute, probably. Gladio can’t really tell. It’s kind of hard to keep track of time in a fight.

Whoever is piloting this ship, if anyone, they haven’t reacted to Gladio wreaking havoc in the hold. He finds a door that seems like it leads to the front, and down that corridor is the cockpit, with its dozens and dozens of buttons, screens and indicators and zero human beings or robots. He appraises it all critically. If he can get this thing to move, and that’s a big if, he could crash it somewhere. Potentially. They can’t be mass-producing these things, it’s gotta be expensive.

The main stick, when he shifts and tries it, doesn’t even budge.

The buttons aren’t any easier to make sense of, either.

In the end, the likelihood of crashing the thing into his own troops outweighs the potential profit of ridding Niflheim of one flying magitek ship, and Gladio shifts again and goes back to the hold.

He didn’t really realize this before, but this ship is up _high_.

It really, really sucks that he can’t operate this thing.

Gladio has no idea how magitek works – nobody in Lucis seems to – but the ship is hovering almost perfectly in place, except for how the wind keeps dragging it a little off course. If it goes on like that, it’ll pass pretty close by one of those weird decorative archways stretching over the courtyard.

What other option does he have, really?

Timing is everything.

It’s still taking everything he has not to shake.

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe breathe breathebreathebreathe _goNOW_.

He might actually be crazy.

It works, is the funny part. This is no action movie, and hitting that thing at the velocity he’s going hurts like a bitch, and all he has to prevent wounds and broken bones is his own fur, but it works – in that after just a minute of panting for the air that his lungs won’t let in, he’s sort of breathing, and it almost doesn’t hurt. Adrenaline, probably. He’ll have to get checked over later. At least he doesn’t seem to have broken any legs.

A massive wave of electricity suddenly engulfs the ship Gladio had just sailed out of, and the entire hulking structure tilts and begins to careen down.

His Majesty. Or Noct. Either way, babysitting royalty seems like a life-long job, if they’re still taking unannounced magical potshots in an actual battle at an age that is well past adolescence.

Only a bit wobbly, he picks his way down, but doesn’t go all the way. There’s a nice little platform from which he can see the courtyard in its entirety, his own tiring troops and Niflheim’s few remaining soldiers clustered away from each other at the opposite sides of the field, regrouping. It’s nothing the Fangs can’t handle, but they might need some sort of push.

Just one more push, and it’ll be over.

The first time Gladio felt the urge to kill, he was in middle school and some punk kid had been saying things about his recently dead mom.

Gladio had felt too big for his body. He’d wanted to hurt that kid till he _squealed_ , to pounce on him and tear at him and make him _wail_.

He hadn’t exactly managed to hold himself back.

Gladio digs for that now. For the rage, for the _how dare he_ , for the _I won’t rest until he hurts, hurts, hurts_.

He grabs that feeling by the scruff and howls.

_We’re strong together_ , it sings. _We keep what’s ours_ , it flows. _We kill them dead_ , it ends.

All is silent, for a moment.

Then a voice starts up, echoing.

Then another, and another still, until it’s all of them at once, a couple dozen mouths stringing together a symphony of impending murder; a chorus of a hundred voices raised in their king’s name.

Gladio’s king is not the reigning one, but he’s a king all the same.

The night envelops him, transparent to his eyes, and Gladio sings his only hymn.

When the MTs all lie strewn about in parts and bits of armor, the Crownsfang sing a different song.

A song of triumph.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is what happens when I get serious. Chapter length just about freakin’ doubles. Anxiety doubles too, though, yugh.
> 
> Yeah, I could’ve put in another huge fight scene where Gladio was clearing out that ship. Yes, I decided not to. Yes, there are plot threads dangling. Why? See above.
> 
> The whole time I was writing this chapter, I kept forgetting it was supposed to be during/after sunset and imagined scenes with, like, bright sunlight everywhere. I have the wolf vision excuse, but still, lol.
> 
> Next update prolly Saturday too. This covid situation is still pretty bad where I live and it’s driving me up the wall with anxiety, so might be even later than that. Sorry, folks. I’ll get the rest of this story done, don’t you worry.
> 
> Feedback keeps me going, btw *wink wink nudge nudge* I know some of you religiously leave a comment on every chapter as it comes out, and I absolutely love you guys for that, but maybe the rest of you could drop a line as well? No pressure, we’re all chill here, but mb just consider it? I just wanna talk to someone, really – ‘bout this fic, FFXV, writing, whatever :)


	8. To look the specter in the eye and claim proudly, "This is I,"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like strategy and worldbuilding so much better than action, honestly. This was a breeze to write compared to Ch7.
> 
> I still hate writing dialogue.
> 
> Friendly recommendation from the author: you might want to open up a map of Tenebrae and Niflheim for this. I don't know if you'll need it, exactly, but there’s lot of strategizing.

**Chapter 8. To look the specter in the eye and claim proudly, “This is I,”**

Not two days after the attack, Cor arrives with reinforcements.

He brings with him some fifty-and-change wolves, a mobile net control station, a few of Insomnia’s highly-valued RPG units, and an offer of allied operations against Niflheim.

Well, Regis makes the actual offer. Cor and his tagalongs are more like proof of concept.

The bigger negotiations get tabled, and a short-term alliance rises swiftly on the scorched marble left behind by the Nifs. Tenebrae agrees easily. That attack was the boldest Niflheim has been in Sylva’s reign.

They might as well strike the iron while it’s hot.

Most of the people who used to live at Fenestala are moved out for the time being, while the builders assess structural integrity and get started on repairs. The royal family gets housed with the late king’s relatives; the Lucians, with their hosts’ permission, take over the guest house.

(Noct demands Gladio stay with him. “For security reasons,” he says, and no one dares object in the wake of a nighttime Niflheim attack.

The actual reasons have little to do with security.

Or, actually, maybe they do. Just not the kind of security that tough, battle-focused commanders often think about.

Gladio wakes up in a cold sweat several times per night, having fallen from a Nif ship or miscalculated the distance of his jump or gotten swarmed by robots with glowing red lights for eyes and limbs that wouldn’t budge no matter how much he struggled.

Noct sleeps through all of it, but wakes from his own nightmares. He’s quiet about it, but Gladio wakes up for them anyway.)

The strategy meetings commence in the War Room of the manor, a room with just enough space for an enormous map table and a couple rows of people around it, and walls as thick as any vault’s. For closed-door meetings, it gets pretty crowded. Tenebrae doesn’t have many generals, but it has plenty of advisors of all kinds, who all have things to say about the plans they’re trying to make. At least they don’t talk all over each other.

Tenebrae’s crown prince, to the Lucians’ surprise, has quite the expertise in warfare and no qualms at all about advising his advisors to can it before his ears curl from their combined stupidity. His mother and sister throw half-hearted glares at him for it, but seem content enough to let him loose. They don’t interrupt him, in any case, and Ravus seems to be the only one bothering to keep the peanut gallery in check.

The peanut gallery takes it in formidable stride.

When he’s not verbally sniping at the nobility, Ravus explains the specifics of the defenses he’s constructed over the last decade around Zoldara Henge and on the Tenebrae-Niflheim border, or what’s left of it. What lies between Niflheim and Tenebrae is mostly mountains, with narrow passes threading through them here and there, most of them too dangerous for foot soldiers. It doesn’t stop Niflheim forces, what with the flying ships and all, but that’s where Ravus’ defenses come in.

Tenebrae, for all that it doesn’t have cell phones or computers or smart homes, has done a decent job of appropriating Niflheim war tech and adapting it for local needs.

Namely, the striking down of Nif warships from a distance.

Any magitek cannon in good enough condition gets mercilessly stripped from its unlucky ship, repurposed, and then hauled over to the outposts dotted across the border region. Ravus has built a whole network of them, with watchposts in the Niflheim-side line, cannons in Tenebrae-side one, and telegraph lines connecting the ones to the others. It’s worked reasonably well so far, shooting down ships and weakening the attack forces sent north from Niflheim.

It won’t work forever. Even the multitudinous advisors recognize that.

Actually, they might recognize that too well, going by what they snipe back at Ravus with.

When asked to list their own contributions, they hem and haw and change the topic.

Gladio is all too familiar with that sort of advisor, and so, he’s willing to bet, are Regis and Noct.

“Something needs to be done to take Niflheim out of the game,” Queen Sylva begins, in Tenebraise for the advisors’ benefit. “Protecting ourselves is all well and good, but it is hardly sustainable. Niflheim has the kind of population resources Tenebrae could never boast. It has technology that we have just begun to understand. We have a standing army that could work as a distraction, at best, and as a decoy, at worst. We need to be smarter than them, or we will lose.

“We have allies,” she nods sedately at Regis; Regis nods back. “We have the enemy’s own technology turned against them, and we have a borrowed platoon of hellhounds capable of tearing steel apart with their bare teeth. Finally, we have two locations of interest: the Ghorovas Rift and the Eusciello desert.

“Our goal is to make Niflheim cease all hostile activity, and to ensure that they do not restart it in the foreseeable future. I would like to know now, ladies and gentlemen, whether any of you have any suggestions you would like to make.”

One of the advisors snorts delicately and strokes one side of his moustache.

“Ask for peace and hope they give it to us,” he says, voice mixing derision and pessimism in equal measure.

Sylva, calm as anything, casts a glance around the room and asks, “Anyone?”

Someone coughs.

Ravus asks, “If I may,” and Sylva nods.

“From what my observers report, the Eusciello region only has a limited military presence. Even if they were ordered to move in, the outposts could hold them back for a time. I’d estimate a week under good conditions.”

“And under bad conditions?” Sylva inquires, eyebrows raised.

“Assuming bad conditions to mean a full fleet of magitek warships making a detour through Eusciello,” Ravus deadpans, “several hours. That said, we still have no information on how many ships, exactly, Niflheim’s fleet boasts. I am assuming twice the amount that participated in their largest attack to date, so about a hundred.”

“Twice is quite pessimistic of you, Your Highness,” says one of the generals; Ravus gives him an expressionless stare.

“I would rather not underestimate an opponent so far ahead of us in war technology,” he says coldly, and the general just nods and shrugs the jibe off.

“Should Eusciello be secured first, then?” asks another advisor. “A good strike on the Henge from the east when we’re focused on heading south, and Tenebrae will be as good as over.”

“We don’t have the luxury of covering our backs,” Ravus crosses his arms. “Or one of drawing this war out, for that matter. While Niflheim has the resources for that, we do not. They’d just have to wait us out. No. We need to strike fast, and hard, and lose as few resources as we can, because we cannot afford to waste any.

“The question is, how do we go about it?”

Regis shifts his weight, in a way that’s at once unobtrusive and makes him seem half a foot taller, and several people next to him turn his way.

“The Crownsfang platoon from Lucis is specifically trained for combat with MT soldiers,” he says, and Tenebrae’s generals look at him with calculating eyes. “They have many successful operations under their belts, and more than one scoured Niflheim base. Field commander Leonis has led them through most of those operations.”

Regis gestures to Cor, and the man straightens even further than he already was and nods sharply.

Another general asks, “Are your – special troops as fragile as they looked in that courtyard skirmish?”

“Not with proper equipment and preparation,” Cor replies smoothly. “In addition, no serious injuries were suffered by any troops in that operation. _Without_ proper equipment or preparation.”

(Gladio came out of that fight with little more than some bruised ribs and a couple sprains. It still hurts.

Noct definitely noticed the wince when Gladio went to lift him up, but didn’t say anything, bless his heart.

Noct himself is completely unhurt. That’s all Gladio cares about, really.)

It takes much longer than one meeting to work out the bare minimum they need to know before they act. Noct takes part in all of those, even though he has little to offer expect basic logic and common sense, expertise-wise. He’s had more of an administrative education than a military one.

It’s still more than some of Tenebrae’s advisors seem able to contribute.

Gladio participates, too, as Noct’s Shield and as the Crownsfang captain-in-training. Only the former of those titles is official, and the king won’t hesitate to appoint someone else, should he deem Gladio unfit for the position by the time Clarus retires from his post as captain, but Gladio doesn’t think it’s unfair, far from it; all it means is that he still has to work to prove himself, and he’d expect that much from anyone serving the Crown. It does mean he’s still in the process of doing that, however, and if someone decided to ask for his opinion on the war plans, he might be in a bit of a pinch.

He still has a ways to go to reach his father’s level, and he’s not one to back down from a challenge, but this is pretty high-stakes for a learning experience.

Misgivings or no misgivings, he participates, for a given value of it, and he listens, and he makes note of everything that’s going on. Officer school and a military history degree don’t make him an expert, but he can at least follow the whys and hows of what his seniors are laying out. It’s not pretty.

This is no drill. This is very, very real.

Gladio is afraid, but no way in Ifrit’s burning kingdom is he letting it show.

“We need to draw them in here,” Ravus says, pointing out a spot in the Ghorovas Rift where several outposts seem to be clustered, “and then we can blast them all at once. If it doesn’t completely decimate them, it’ll weaken them plenty at the very least.”

“What then,” asks Cor. “We can’t just destroy their army and call it a day. They’ll make a new one. And from what I’ve seen, it doesn’t seem like they’ll surrender after one attack.”

“Neither do we have any resources to waste on demolishing their military facilities until Niflheim runs out of the money to rebuild them,” says Ravus grimly. Several of the generals near him frown deeper. “Niflheim’s complete destruction or complete demilitarization are our two immediately obvious options.”

A heavy silence hangs over the table for several longs seconds, until Ravus says, “If we decide to impose continued demilitarization on Niflheim, we shall have to take measures regardless – “ and Sylva clicks one of her rings on the table in a way that looks innocuous, but the sound echoes across the room, and Ravus closes his mouth mid-sentence.

“My apologies for interrupting, Ravus,” she says, silvery voice beautiful and solid, “but I believe that to be a question for another discussion. Let us keep to today’s topic and talk about the more immediate measures we could take.”

The crown prince inclines his head in deference, and the queen smiles.

Neither Gladio nor Noct are invited to that other meeting, but Gladio can roughly guess what Ravus had been about to suggest.

You don’t discuss potential regicide in a room full of advisors.

The meetings get even more restricted after that. Noct only gets invited to a few of them, and when he does, Gladio is not allowed inside. Noct shares with him anyway, at night, with their faces inches from the other’s skin or clothes or hair. Gladio halfheartedly tries to scold him for spilling the details he clearly isn’t supposed to, but then he remembers what they swore to each other not a week ago, and the lectures die unspoken.

Tenebrae wasn’t working with the Niflheim resistance, but now it’s trying to. There are agreements. Clauses. Conditions, as many and as carefully thought-out as they can get them in such a rush. It takes days to get any answers, because the resistance leaders refuse to meet in person and the letters need to pass undetected.

There’s little help Tenebrae alone can offer; Lucis gets roped into it as well. Its limited supply of firearms will be the only thing of any use.

The dust has barely settled on the deal with the resistance when the strategy meetings begin anew, this time with fewer incompetent onlookers and more brainstorming. It’s messy, and more than a little chaotic, and the queen mostly plays mediator while her generals tear into each other and Ravus threatens to send them all into retirement. The prince has quite the tongue on him, which is all the more impressive for how civil his actual words are, if not the ways he puts them together. He is even less likable to Gladio than the princess, but there’s a grudging respect there, too. A military commander doesn’t need to be sociable to do his job right, and Ravus is hardly much more unsociable than a post-deployment Cor.

Gladio is a little surprised those two aren’t getting along better than they are, but they might just be too similar.

He watches the prince’s features twist into a grimace of long-suffering distaste and thinks, _Maybe not_.

Eventually, the commanding officers have hammered out enough plans that preparations can begin for the actual troops. Gladio gets a lot more involved in that, mostly because he knows what needs to be done, and also because he cares. He can’t not. Cor may be the toppest top brass currently responsible for the Crownsfang here, but Gladio grew up tussling with those Fangs in the Citadel. He’d gotten his posture fixed and his rolls corrected and his worries soothed.

He knows what some of the other officers think of the privates. He also knows that most Fangs who start as privates don’t go above sergeant. They _choose_ not to, is the kicker. Lieutenants don’t get teams.

It’s a different relationship, a lieutenant and their sergeants. Not like the teams at all. Gladio’s seen enough to realize that.

But Gladio cares, and Gladio has attachments, and Gladio feels responsible even though Cor’s here, so Gladio does what he thinks an officer is supposed to do. He makes sure everyone else does their job right.

If that means he has to personally check that everyone puts on their bulletproof vests and helmets before the big op, then so be it.

“You’re just doing the sergeants’ job for them, you know,” Arnis remarks in the officers’ makeshift lounge-slash-offices without looking up from his game of solitaire.

“I know,” replies Gladio. Arnis just grins.

“If the grunts start calling you ‘mom’, I’m staying out of it,” he chortles, and something about it sends Gladio’s upper lip climbing and his nose scrunching.

He forces his face back in order and goes back to his work.

(“Take these with you,” says Noct. In his hands are some of his elemental bombs: a bunch of fire ones and some with electricity, from the looks of it.

“Noct, you know those are too dangerous to use in combat. They hit allies too often.”

“I’ve been working on them,” Noctis argues. “Got them on a five second delay, and you have to push this part in first.”

Gladio rolls one in his hands. It feels sturdier than the usual fare, and there’s definitely a spot that could be pushed in, but he’s still extremely careful.

“I’ll probably be stuck at command point anyway,” he says, and pats his ribs for emphasis. “Cor hasn’t cleared me for combat yet.”

“And how often does everything go to plan?” Noct retorts, subtly peeved.

Gladio can’t even object because about this one thing, at least, Noct is completely right.

Plans tend to go out the window when real life gets involved.

They look away from each other, uneasy.

“Don’t land yourself in hospital again,” says Noctis, quiet and serious and trying to mask his concern with something casual.

A couple years ago, he would’ve laughed it off, but today, he can’t see the point.

There are some lies you tell yourself. There are some lies you can’t tell others.

Gladio can’t bring himself to say anything, so he just kisses Noct until they both forget why they started.)

He gives the bombs to the sergeants, with a lengthy lecture on magic safety and strict instructions to use only in a “life or defeat” situation.

It’s a big gamble, what they’re planning. If Niflheim is better equipped than they know of, they’re done. If they fail to draw enough forces out of Gralea, they’re done. If they get double-crossed by the resistance, they’re doubly done.

There are contingency plans for those eventualities, sure, but everyone knows where plans tend to go in real life.

The Lucis-Niflheim conflict has kept Lucis mostly on the defensive, all thirty-something on-and-off years of it. Niflheim has airships; Lucis doesn’t. Niflheim dips their toes in Lucis territory; Lucis comes down on them with the Crownsfang. Niflheim retreats; and Lucis lets them, because chasing those Nifs and their airships would be like a human trying to catch a wasp with nothing but bare hands.

Thirty years, and Lucis still doesn’t have anything resembling serious aircraft.

Gladio can’t help but wonder if anyone’s had a hand in that.

That might be wishful thinking on his part. He wants something more solid to blame than a lack of the resources required for the kind of military production lines Niflheim’s got going. He wants something he can charge at and tear apart, just for the satisfaction of taking action and fixing something with it.

No matter. Lucis has what it has.

And what Lucis has is good enough to keep the Nifs from taking over even a tiny little village for over thirty years. What Lucis has was enough to repel a surprise attack with only one sixth of its forces and no real armor. What Lucis has, is what makes grown men wet their pants.

So what if Lucis doesn’t have enough natural resources to mass-produce explosives and gunpowder. So fucking what.

Lucis has wolves.

A cool breeze crawls in through the south-facing window, ruffling the gauzy curtains and brushing across Noctis’ cheeks. It’s hardly a cold night, especially for Tenebrae in summer, but the wind is coming from the mountains and the Rift beyond them. Noctis imagines he can smell the snow, but it’s more of a fantasy. They don’t get snow very often in Insomnia.

In the window seat, Lunafreya sits with one of her dogs, petting it distractedly and looking down at the world outside. This room is pretty high up, and the view is something else: Zoldara Henge’s faintly lit streets, the snow-capped mountains in the distance, and the full moon covering everything in thin, cold light.

It’s a nice night. Too nice for what’s going on where Noctis was not allowed to follow. He’s made his peace with it, but he is hardly happy.

He won’t be able to sleep tonight. He knows that much.

“All will be well,” Lunafreya says, and he looks over at her, startled. She meets his eyes with a calm, warm confidence.

From the mountains, a familiar howl comes echoing, over the peaks and across the sea, carried on gods only know what winds. The field of battle is probably at least a hundred miles away. Tenebrae is a small country, but still.

“Such an emotional sound,” says Lunafreya, her gaze, like Noctis’, now fixed on the far distance, where the battle would be taking place.

“They sound proud,” Noctis replies, a hint of a smile on his lips. He surprises himself most of all with that smile.

If he listens close enough, he can pick Gladio’s voice out of the weave.

He says, “I think we’ll be hearing good news in the morning.”

Lunafreya closes her eyes, tilts her face towards the moon and smiles as well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ravus went kinda OOC there, but what the heck, we’re doing canon divergence here, and this Ravus is more fun for me to deal with. I doubt people are reading this for Ravus anyway.
> 
> No telling when the last chapter will be out because I might be out of town for the next week, but it /will/ be out. Think 30th, but don’t count on it.


	9. And when the time comes to depart,

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry I'm laaaaaaaaaate

**Chapter 9. And when the time comes to depart,**

A few days after the hostilities have ceased, Gladio is invited to morning tea with Her Highness Lady Lunafreya.

He sits on a dainty little chair that is, thankfully, sturdier than it looks, limits his pastry consumption rate to polite levels with a practiced effort, and pets Pryna’s off-white muzzle that’s resting on his thigh. The dainty little round table holding up their tea and pastries is drenched in sunlight from the enormous window next to it. Princess Lunafreya fits right in with all that light and daintiness.

There are some cookies on the cookie platter that are very obviously Gladio-sized. He appreciates the thought.

Morning tea is what passes for breakfast in Tenebrae. The most nutritious thing you can expect to see on the table is butter; perhaps some cheese or a boiled egg. The rest is baked goods of all kinds: wheat bread, rye bread, oatmeal bread, and pastries, pastries, pastries. It’s like no one in Tenebrae needs to work early.

Gladio is going to need a second breakfast after this.

“I am glad you accepted my invitation, Lieutenant,” Lunafreya says as the maid that poured their tea retreats. Gladio sharpens his sense of smell just a little tiny bit and get a whiff of something light and fruity from the cup, but that’s it.

“I couldn’t possibly refuse,” he says. He may be military, but he’s at least as skilled in noble conversation as any other titled man; he can make it through this without giving up too much sensitive info or upsetting foreign royalty.

“How is your health?” Lunafreya inquires mildly. “I hear you’ve suffered some wounds in the recent action.”

“Just a few bruises,” he replies, “but thank you for your concern, Your Highness.”

She smiles, faint, but warm.

“If they bother you, please do not hesitate to ask for my assistance. You were injured in the course of protecting my home. Healing your hurts is the least I could do.”

“I really am quite fine, Highness.”

“Is it a Lucian custom, to deny what ails you?” She smiles to show she doesn’t mean it as an insult, but Gladio still remembers the way his mom died. He thinks it might be more of an Amicitia thing.

Lunafreya looks away and gazes out into the garden, a thoughtful, almost wistful expression on her face.

“In Tenebrae, people fear being sick,” she speaks, eyes fixed on something far away. “But even more than that, they fear the cure. And for good reason, I suppose. Surgery ends in further injury or death in one quarter of all documented cases.” She cuts a wry and yet sad glance to Gladio. “A terrifying number, isn’t it? It is why so many people flock to me and my mother’s Healing Days. The line crosses many a street. Particularly unscrupulous entrepreneurs sell spots at the head of it to the highest bidder, and we cannot prohibit stand-ins because not everyone has the strength to stay standing long enough.”

There’s not much that Gladio knows about the state of medical affairs in Lucis, but one quarter sounds like way too much even to him. Judging by Lunafreya’s face, they’re of a mind on this.

“I do not begrudge the common folk for seeking my help,” the princess continues. “However, my own strength is not unlimited. Not even me and my mother combined can heal all those who come in a single day. So many leave untreated, and one can never be certain that they will be able to come another day.”

She meets Gladio’s eyes, calmly resolute.

“An alliance with Lucis could mean that Tenebraean medicine would finally be able to provide the services it is meant to. It could mean that with enough time and work, the cure would no longer be scarier than the disease. If marriage is the only way to ensure that, I shall wear a wedding dress without hesitation.

“Of course, we are no longer in the seventh century, and marriage should not be the only way to secure peaceful relations between countries, but considering that Niflheim has only recently stopped its aggression, I doubt either side will be satisfied with anything less than blood ties.”

Gladio looks away and pets Pryna gently.

So that’s it, then. The princess won’t stop at much to get what she wants, or what she thinks her citizens want. It’s what royalty is supposed to do. He can’t even blame her for it.

Lunafreya rests a hand on the table and leans forward a fraction, and when Gladio looks back up at her, she seems – ‘sympathetic’ is perhaps not the word, and neither is ‘reassuring’, but it’s something steadfast that borders on both of those.

“I am under no illusions, Lord Amicitia. I can tell a political union from a meeting of hearts, and I do not long for the latter. If it does come to marriage, however, and everything that follows, I expect I shall be too busy overseeing the modernization of Tenebrae’s – ‘healthcare system’, I believe it is called in Lucis – to step on any toes,” says Luna evenly, with a small, polite smile, but her eyes are conspiratorial and full of humor and Gladio is at least seventy percent sure that when she was talking about toes, she meant his. “And besides,” she flat-out grins, “I hear Lucian medicine is quite progressive in more areas than one.”

Gladio stares at her for a second, and then it clicks.

Well.

If everything does work out that way, he can live with it. Probably.

It’s a pretty faraway future to imagine.

“I’m sure I have no idea whose toes you could possibly step on, Your Highness,” he says, deadpan in his best Cor impression except for the comically raised eyebrows. “And I don’t think anyone would stop you should you avail yourself of Lucian medicine.”

Lunafreya hides her smile behind her cup of tea.

“I am glad to hear it,” she says through skillfully suppressed laughter.

Instead of grinning back openly, Gladio grabs a large cookie from the table and demolishes it in two bites.

Pryna sighs at him, and he pets her some more.

Jared has a small feast prepared when Gladio gets home. Iris tries to behave like she doesn’t want to cling and never let him out of her sight again, and his dad drily congratulates him on surviving the ordeal and bringing his entire troop back alive.

He didn’t intend to go to the manor this evening, but Iris sends a text and Noct gives him his blessing to take a night off, in not quite such pleasant words (“You’ll be stuck with me for all those state dinners and parties and whatnot all next week, go spend time with them”).

So, he goes.

He isn’t even unhappy about it.

Iris runs circles around him all evening, switching between worry and childish awe at what he’s been through. Some part of her seems to understand that Gladio could’ve parted with his life at any point in those two weeks he’d spent in Tenebrae, but the other part believes him when he sits back, grins proudly, and tells her that Lucis had the advantage all along.

She’ll be taking entrance exams for uni next spring. She doesn’t need the stress.

“But how was it? Tenebrae?” Iris asks over a half-finished plate of roast. “I mean, aside from the whole war thing.”

Gladio chews thoughtfully for a moment.

“I had tea with their princess,” he delivers, “and I was a hit with her dogs.”

“For real?! Is she pretty?”

“What, you don’t know what she looks like?”

“Well, duh, she’s never been to Lucis and there’s no pictures, so,” Iris shrugs, “is she?”

“’course she is, she’s a princess.”

Something must show on Gladio’s face, because Iris’ gets a smugly teasing tilt to it.

“Did you put your best moves on her?”

“What’s that supposed to mean,” he grumbles.

“I mean, you do flirt with everything that moves.”

“What decade are you living in, kiddo? That was a long time ago.”

“Was it? You know, I once thought to count all your girlfriends to mock you about it later, but I lost count somewhere in the twenties.”

“Uh-huh,” Gladio grunts, annoyed, and Iris only grins brighter. “How’s your crush on Prince Sleeps-a-lot doing?”

Iris doesn’t even blink.

“Actually, I think I’m going to give up on it,” she says, no less cheerful than she was a moment ago. “It’s not like anything could possibly work out anyway. I mean, he’s the prince, I’m an Amicitia, we couldn’t get married even if we wanted to. _And_ he’ll probably marry someone for political reasons whatever he feels like about it, and I wouldn’t want to be ‘the other woman’.

“So there,” she gestures with a fork for emphasis, “more trouble than it’s worth.”

“That’s good,” says Gladio. He glances discreetly at his father and looks for that feeling inside himself that let him jump out of a flying Niflheim warship. “Because we’re together.”

Iris, confused, says, “Huh?”

“Noct and I. We’re…” And there he trails off, looking for a proper way to phrase it. ‘In a relationship’ sounds too casual; ‘married’ is factually wrong, whatever their feelings on the matter may be. ‘Committed’ seems too bold to say out loud, even if it might as well be the closest thing to truth.

Before he can finish his thought, Iris erupts with an astounded, “What!?”

Their father, silent and expressionless, takes a generous sip of wine.

It takes a few minutes for Iris to calm down and her questions to peter out. They’re not so much questions as they are a rambling stream of consciousness, anyway. It all boils down, essentially, to one thing: that Iris had no idea about any of that.

“Sheesh, Gladdy, how did I not notice? Oh, wait, how serious are you guys?”

Gladio very pointedly _does not_ look at his father.

“Pretty serious,” he says.

With a slap of her hands on the table, Iris rises.

“This is an ice cream occasion,” she declares. “I got the really nice kind special for your coming-back dinner, but it’s so much more on point now. Gladdy, you’re fine with chocolate mint, right? Dad?”

Their father waves a dismissive hand. Gladio nods.

Iris flits away to the kitchen, and then it’s just Gladio’s dad, unreadable as always and silent as a stone.

For a long minute, no one says anything.

Gladio still doesn’t look at his father.

Finally, Clarus asks, “What about the treaty’s conditions?”

Gladio could play dumb. Of course he could. And yes, of course his dad would be in the know on the backstage goings-on of Lucis, there’s no way he wouldn’t have known marriage was – still is – a potential clause. All Gladio needs to do is take that question out of context. Steer the conversation towards politics and benefits and contingencies. They both do that sort of planning for a living, it’ll be easy enough to talk about. His dad might even let him get away with it.

If Gladio does that, he’ll be giving up ground, and he doesn’t want to do that now. He’s an Amicitia. He’s not taking his words back.

“We’ve figured it out,” he says, roundabout but entirely honest. His dad gives absolutely no indication of his feelings on the matter.

“Meet me on the deck after dinner,” Clarus says, and Gladio feels his heart shrivel with unease like a prune. “We’ll talk.”

Gladio makes himself nod and distractedly contemplates which of his remaining belongings he’ll be able to take with him if he ever needs to pack in a hurry.

It’s a cool, clear night. The sun has barely set, but the crickets are out in full force, and the stars are twinkling blissfully on the eastern slope of the skydome.

It’s a nice night for getting disowned.

Gladio sits on the deck alone with his thoughts for several minutes, chewing on the possibility of losing his last name and trying not to bite through to the bitter fear inside, before his dad makes an appearance. Clarus spares him one glance, then walks forward to lean on the railing, shake a cigarette out of seemingly nowhere, and light up with an unpracticed, but curt motion.

The scene barely computes.

“Didn’t know you smoked,” Gladio forces out. He tries to make it sound casual, but it’s a lost cause.

Clarus watches the stars above for a few moments and says, evenly, “I didn’t want to have this conversation drunk.”

Gladio has some trouble imagining why his dad could possibly need a drink for this. Any other dad, sure, but not his.

The cigarette smolders in Clarus’ grasp little by little, a bright red point with just enough light for itself. It flares when he takes a drag, slow, long. It’s like he has nowhere to hurry. Why would he; it’s probably just Gladio who’s anxious. Must be.

“I’d expected something like that,” his dad speaks, low and as inscrutable as ever. “You were practically joined at the hip, the two of you. Your mother and I had a wager going. I guess I owe her a hundred,” he says, unsmiling.

Gladio can’t tell if his dad is not, in fact, disowning him, or if it’s just so simple it’s implied and doesn’t need to be said out loud.

His gut churns.

Good gods, why did he ever think coming clean to his dad was a good idea!?

“I’d hoped for you and the prince to grow up as brothers,” Clarus continues. “Should’ve introduced you earlier, maybe. Doesn’t matter now. You’ve taken him in as yours regardless.”

His dad takes another drag and goes quiet.

Gladio takes the plunge.

In a voice as casual as he can muster, he asks, “So, what degree of disownment are we talking about?”

Clarus blinks at him owlishly for a moment.

“I’m not disowning you,” he says.

Then he turns away, leans even more heavily on the railing, and gives a long, quiet sigh.

“Why can I never talk to you right,” he mumbles, more to himself than Gladio.

Gladio can’t think of anything to say to that.

For a while, they’re both silent. Clarus seems to be gathering his thoughts, and Gladio gives him time to do that. It’s not like he’s ever been any better at father-son talks than his dad. This isn’t a council room, where everyone is always looking for an opening to strike in order to further their own agenda. This is family. Gladio had hoped all his life that he’d never have to treat his own father as a political opponent, but he’s been proven wrong time and time again.

Even now, he doesn’t want to.

At some point, he becomes aware of his dad looking at him, and in some way, instead of strict, Clarus just looks tired. Older than he was a minute ago.

“You were your mother’s son,” he says, and it sounds strange, to Gladio’s ears. Regretful, maybe. Maybe a tiny bit bitter. It doesn’t make much sense.

Then again, his dad seems full of surprises tonight.

He asks, cautiously, just to be sure, “You’re not telling me I’m not actually your son, are you?”

Clarus boggles at him as much as he’s capable of, which isn’t that much at all, but it’s telling nonetheless.

“I _know_ you’re mine,” he says with force, and then huffs with enough frustration for Gladio to notice, which means there must be a lot. Clarus looks out into the dark yard for a moment, and when he speaks again, he’s back to calm. “What I meant was, whatever problem you were having, you went to her if you went to anyone. Not to me. To her. Your achievements, worries, you took it all to her.”

The mother in Gladio’s memories is always smiling. Always kind.

“I think I just – expected only criticism from you,” he thinks aloud. “Or indifference, I guess. I don’t remember you ever praising me for anything.”

It’s true: he doesn’t. If there’s anything Gladio could liken his father to, the father he remembers from his childhood, it would be a judge.

“I didn’t think it necessary,” Clarus says.

_Didn’t think it necessary_. Didn’t think it necessary?

Huh.

“Did you know anything at all about raising kids when you had me?”

His dad shifts his weight in a way that sends signals to Gladio’s animal brain, and he braces himself without meaning to. Clarus has never raised his hand against him outside of training, but some switch gets flipped anyway.

Gladio braces himself, and waits, and waits, but his dad says nothing, and says nothing, and says nothing, and that tinge of alertness swings away from fear and into anger.

“You know, mom never thought me hopeless.”

“Neither did I.”

“Then you did a crap job of showing it,” he just about snarls. “You remember what you said to me when I could barely stand after training with you? ‘Not good enough,’ that’s what you said. I must’ve been, what, eight? Nine? You pushed me in a way sergeants don’t push grown men, and then you were _dissatisfied_ with me when I couldn’t keep up? I remember the fights mom used to have with you about it, you know. I used to think that constant bruises and aching muscles were normal all the way till high school!”

Gladio cuts himself off before he can say too much, and notices that he’s panting and that his eyes are stinging from how strongly he’s glaring out at the garden. His body wants to move. To run or to fight, it doesn’t seem to matter. He unclenches his shoulders bit by bit, with a conscious effort.

“I only intended to help,” says Clarus, quiet and so infuriatingly bland. “Help you grow into a Shield that wouldn’t break with one strike.”

“Yeah,” Gladio chuckles bitterly. “Of course.” Suddenly, he huffs a laugh. To his father’s raised eyebrow, he says, “I just remembered. You know that time when I got kicked by an anak and got stuck in hospital for a bit?” Clarus nods. “When Iris came to visit me, she said the same thing. ‘I just wanted to help.’ I guess it runs in the family, huh.”

The bitterness churns, churns, churns, and slowly boils down into an achy sort of feeling. Gladio can’t name it, but he doesn’t like it much.

“Until your mother was gone,” Clarus begins slowly, “I didn’t much care if you loved me. I’d only meant to raise you strong. Toughen you up. We Amicitias do not get easy lives.”

“And, what, you cared after?”

His dad doesn’t reply, and, eventually, Gladio stops expecting him to.

In the lull, it becomes obvious how quiet the night is.

“For what it’s worth,” Clarus says suddenly, “I’m glad you’re my son.”

Shit.

Gladio puts his elbows on the railing, some distance away from his dad, bends down until his forehead touches his hands, and closes his eyes.

Fuck it all to hell. He hates this. His dad’s an impassive asshole, until suddenly he’s throwing sentiments around. What the fuck. Gladio can’t even tell if he means them, at this point. He can’t tell shit. Maybe his dad’s just got resting strict-face. Maybe nothing he says can be taken at face value. Fuck.

Maybe Gladio’s the only one who’s messed up here. Wouldn’t that be a lark.

Maybe he shouldn’t have blown up like that. Maybe, the wise thing to do would’ve been to keep it all down and not rock this half-rotted, patched-up boat. But what can he do about it now.

He raises his head, tired like after one of his dad’s training sessions, and Clarus is looking at him with something that, on him, almost looks like concern.

Gladio can’t handle it.

He looks away.

He doesn’t want concern or pity or anything. He wants an apology. Maybe. Fat chance of that.

But. He’s got acknowledgement, of a sort. That’ll have to count for something.

“Alright,” he whispers, hoarse. “Alright.” _Truce._

Maybe _peace_.

Maybe, peace.

Those words from his dad might have been what he’d needed to hear. One of the things, at least.

Whatever the rest might be. Whenever he’ll get to hear his dad say them, if at all.

He’s not a child anymore. He’s a Shield King Regis can only dream about, because Noct is Noct and Gladio is his to the marrow of his bones, and if that’s not enough, then the gods themselves will have to take over, and that’ll mark the limit of mortal might.

Gladio may be mortal, but he has enough might to do what he must.

He’ll be alright.

The one who’d believed he deserved to be disowned had been Gladio himself.

Later that night, Gladio stretches out in his old bed and sends a text to Noct.

_I’m gonna stay over here tonite. Too late to get back to Cit._

The manor settles around him like a worn, familiar shell, with marks ground into it by Iris’ thudding feet, by his mother’s voice and his father’s steady presence and Gladio’s own memories keeping it all connected. It all fits a little wrong. Like if he wears it too long, it’ll chafe.

That’s what happens when you outgrow things.

The sensation of floorboards and garden grass under his paws, though. The gentle bite of Iris’ puppy teeth on his fingers. The scents of his family everywhere. That’ll stay with him, wherever he goes.

Gladio’s phone pings.

_If you’re expecting me to burst into tears and tell you how much I’m gonna miss you, you’ll be waiting a long time._

He grins. Brat.

_Wouldn’t dream of it._

The reply is almost immediate.

_You’ll be back tomorrow, right?_

_Bright n early_ , he types _._

_Counting on it_ , Noct sends back.

Some sort of warm relaxation spreads through him, like that one time they had him on the good stuff in the hospital, but without the overwhelming wash of a drug. It’s a comfortable contentment that fits like a puzzle piece and makes his mouth stretch into a smile on its own.

Gods help him, but he loves that brat.

_See you tomorrow_ , he sends.

Tomorrow, he’ll be back where he belongs.

**to bring with you**

**your restless heart.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // WARNING // WARNING // MASSIVE AUTHOR’S NOTE INCOMING //
> 
> A huge, huuuuuge T H A N K Y O U to everyone who’s commented, kudos’ed, and just ghosted this story to its end. You made the journey so much more fun than it could’ve been. And thank you to all the people who got here once it was all said and done, too. I love every single one of you <3 You are amazing and worthy of all the good things in life.
> 
> You might have noticed this is now in a series – that’s because I’ve posted a garbage bag of drabbles for this verse. It’s literally just stuff that appeared in my head but didn’t fit into the flow of the story. It might be fun. If you want to get a palate cleanser and kind of switch away after this, it should work for that. There’ll be one or two more updates, and then I’ll mark than one complete.
> 
> I gotta confess, a part of what inspired me for this fic was notavodkashot’s “the nature of the beast”, which has an incredibly detailed world AND werecreatures, so if you’re a fan of all that and like long and plotty fics, I definitely recommend. It’s quality stuff. Fair warning: it’s still unfinished, and it looks like it’s gonna a while, and it’s also Cor/Nyx, which is not for everyone, but there’s much more plot than shipping in there.
> 
> Another part was a Japanese animated movie “Wolf Children Ame and Yuki”, which is chock-full of adorable werewolf pups. If you notice any parallels with Iris’ chapter, I plead guilty in advance.
> 
> Last, but not least: The Fic That Shall Not Be Named But Now Will Be, that Hypnagogia witch with a capital B, is finally all written and posted [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24586696). If you’re an emotional masochist and/or a fan of emotional hurt/comfort and Noctis whump, get hyped. Consumer warning: may contain trace amounts of Gladnoct, death, suicide, unstable mental states and crackpot theories. It’s basically 12K of game ending fix-it through suffering. How I got through it, I’ll never know. So, like, I’m encouraging you to check it out, because self-promotion is the only kind of free promotion you get in life, but mind your triggers, please. There’ll be some extra warnings on it, just to be safe.
> 
> With all this said, thank you once again for reading this kooky amalgamation of clichés and family drama, and may your day be nice as folk.
> 
> Peace.
> 
> P.S. Oh, oh, oh, has anyone noticed the poem? ✧ (O ω O) ✧


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